last of all - the first bit. The title.

And finally! Morph lifts the dumbells. Behind him is the allotment in full colour to represent his realised labour and dreams. You don't have to go to the gym to get fit...

By this time poor old Morph was coming to bits and I unashamedly used his background pic to prop him up. His dumbells had broken too, but I managed to stick them together for long enough to complete the sequence which is a bit shaky - but then so was he!

This is the bit where Morph daydreams. I did 3 simple drawings in photoshop, using the layers so that I could see where to draw for each movement, and looped them to get this simple repeat.

I'm not quite sure what happened here - Morph is supposed to close his eyes and drift off to daydreams, well, he does in the original

Next sequence, ...

Not quite in the right order yet but Morph has done daydreaming and is off to get his dumbells for his last sequence

The next sequence was done in photoshop cs4.

I made a background picture of sky, and background earth, then over that on a fresh layer I drew a foreground pile of earth.
Sandwiched between these are numerous layers with seed, shoot and flowers and roots at various stages, all of which were saved as 11 stills.
These were saved as jpegs and imported into premiere 5.
I then applied video effects to cross fade each into the next and set it to sequence, as an avi file again (h264 which I used for the mask line drawings was not powerful enough here)



I hoped that the roots would look as though they had flattened the earth. I think I was a little too vigorous with my eraser on that particular frame but it doesn't seem too bad and time is short. If I have time I will return to the appropriate still and correct it. I had wanted it to look as though the violet had started an avalanche (after a Tennessee Williams quote, "the violets in the mountains can move rocks" but the scale was difficult. So...

Another try at Morph. This time I could load the version I wanted to. It has a slower pace and shows facial expressions more, and when he falls over he stays down so that you can see it a bit more - more of a sense of giving up.

first try morph.

Morph is made from plasticine. It isn't very durable (it cracks easily if you bend it too far) and he kept falling over on to the dumbells breaking his nose, but it was fine for a short piece like this.
I had several different pairs of eyes ready to use for different expressions, so I didn't have to stop working for long when I needed them.
The dumbells are made from polymer clay, something I learned how to do from Alex's microteach.
Lighting is just available light, but the clouds seemed to pass over him when he was trying his hardest to no avail, which fits quite well with the feeling of it, so I left it as it was.
Behind and underneath are two college sketchbooks which give a nice plain background, he could be anywhere (but not anywhere particularly inspiring).