Jemma Fourie - Wishful Thinking

The short film we made with a group of 4 during the Stopmotion minor at St Joost School of Art and Design

The prompt was "how to" and we chose "how to make a wish" - we interviewed many people and made a selection of wishes, which you see in the film.

The making-of:

I was involved in the whole process of this film, from the idea to scripting, storyboarding, prop and puppet-making, set construction, costumes, puppet animation, exploding things, rig removal, cleanup and compositing.

Some of my most interesting contributions are shown in detail on this page:

The lamp and trash can, which were made from a collection of secondhand/ found materials, 3D printing, and involved getting into the metal and wood workshops!

The trash can:

I found this bin at a thrift store

made a 3D Blender model and printed it out flat

cut up the bin, flattened it

used this old machine to create the grooves

the trash can in action!

The lamp:

trophy (thrift store)

candlestick (thrift store)

3D printed top

The puppets for Unicorn, Computer and One-day-fly:

I had fun finding the best solutions for each puppet - for example the fly was made from chewing gum packets, which had the right shape for an hourglass.

A test with the hourglass - when I later animated him he was intentionally much less smooth, because his character is stressed and hyperactive, he needed to move more jerkily. His wings are made from casing of electrical wire.

Another test for the hourglass fly, with a real hourglass - the timing with the sand was too difficult to control. I also started working on real glass hourglass replacement puppets, with hourglasses I found in bulk in the thrift store, but due to time constraints and the delicate glass, the chewing gum packet puppet became our final puppet!

. Computer was a collection of electrical parts, with a bicycle light in the back of his head which I attached with the help of the Techlab. Unicorn was a barbie body. I used a very light airdry clay to sculpt her face, which had replacement magnetic mouths

cutting his replacement faces from a takeaway food container. the faces were drawn by our teammate Manasse

Exploding things! And editing it with exploding text afterwards

When considering how to show the destruction of the earth, I really wanted to film some real slow-motion explosions. After some research I realised it would be difficult to achieve in the Netherlands due to firework restrictions and not having a suitable space - but I got the opportunity when I went home to visit family in South Africa, where fireworks are much more available! We exploded all sorts of things - eggs, vases, fruit, vegetables, teapots, balloons, mini globes. Due to the spontaneous nature of this filming opportunity, we only had an old iPhone to film with, so the recordings were a little low-quality, but I was able to disguise that in post-production

A test I made, when we were considering the star being a character with a (naked) human body

My design for our liveaction scene - I later sewed/ made the outfits for this liveaction scene.

A sleeping bag for the caterpillar's body with work gloves for his hands; a papier-mache unicorn head with a duster for the hair; and a glittery bag I found in the school giveaway shop, which I turned into a shirt for the barbie puppet and the liveaction scene. The computer head was borrowed from the techlab and filmed separately.

This cockroach character didn't make it into the final script as we had so many characters already! But here was a style test for his wish (to be able to consume everything without it affecting his health)

below, part of the storyboard for the cut cockroach character (with Tijn's voice, thank you)

A material test, with pewter