In the forest of Grey-Deer, a young witch called Annie, lover of candy, enjoys the absence of her grand-mother to try out some new magic experiences …

The Legendary Clumsiness of Annie is a short film made in stop motion and create by three enthusiast graduates of a CGI animation school in France. This short animation will be available for free and used as a pilot for a possible cartoon broadcasting on television.

In 2014, we were introduced to the art of stop motion and Annie became our school project. The fulfillment of a short film made with real material allowed us to discover and learn this third way of animation, other than computer-generated and traditional drawn animations.

This project was completed in a short frame time, space and ressources. It’s for those reasons that we wanted to work together again. The use of stop motion allow us to highlight and appreciate the quality of handmade settings, while solicit the pleasure of creating. Her charm and authenticity added value to our project. The choice of this technique was therefore obvious for us.

The idea for The Legendary Clumsiness of Annie is to rework the script of our previous short film created in school. We want to focus mostly on its content and design in order to make a more professional and more finished version.

Here are some images of the making off :

The pre-production including : the graphic researches of concept art for the characters and sets, the technical issues of manufacturing, the scripting and storyboard were realized and validated. Now let us introduce you to Annie and her faithful companion, a voodoo doll who will assist the young witch in all her adventures. Of course, he will be a part of this short film

Resin will be the basic element for Annie’s head. For each of her facial expressions we will elaborate a collection of heads representing the key posing of her eyes and her mouth. That will permit us to animate it frame by frame. She will wear real small clothes made out of hand-stitched fabric. Her hands will be composed of silicone surrounding skeleton made of aluminum wire for the animation of her fingers.

Her companion will be made like a real doll : Entirely made of fabric and padded with cotton.

The cottage will be built with wood and plaster. Polystyrene will be used to make the furniture and everything will be hand-painted by us. The forest around the cottage will be formed by trees made of polystyrene and plaster, embellished with scale modeling lichen for their leafs.