I hope everyone has had a pleasant start into the autumn. It has been rather busy here as we moved into an nice film studio right on time before the shooting of ‘The Lighthouse’ starts. The set is nearly finished, most of the props too and the studio equipment is complete.
Beside that, I had the joy to produce the show package for the Dutch Design Awards 2009 together with my old colleagues from Studio Dumbar. I’m looking forward to show you some of the videos and a few little insights on how they were made, in the upcoming days!

Seeing the 3D printer spitting out props is a real treat. The results are utterly stunning. And after months of handcrafting objects, the rapid prototyping machine is a huge help in creating the set I was hoping for. After getting stuck on creating highly complex metal objects, I had to figure out a way to get them inexpensively done. Just after a couple of prototypes, 3D printing was the obvious way to go.

Imagine crawling a race with a tortoise and suddenly you realise how slow you are by seeing the tale of the tortoise disappear at the horizon, way in front of you. Yeah, you figure… that’s how it feels when I’m having a closer look at the production planning lately. Producing and financing a short film all by your own isn’t the quickest way to do a project which is known for being done as a team effort. So what’s the current state?

I intended to publish a lot more often, especially at the beginning of the production. But the enormous workload keeps me from doing so – which is actually good, at least for the film. Though I’ll try to get more stuff online in the future! Anyway, quite a lot of things happened this September!

Just a couple of hours ago I’ve finished the final animatic for The Lighthouse. And tomorrow I’ll be heading to London to meet up with some friends and for getting proper clay (Newplast is one of the best plasticines around) and some other supplies that I’ll need the following months… the U.K. is simply the place for getting supplies if you do stop motion.

Storyboarding is always great. It’s just amazing to see how everything takes form on paper, transforming into the bigger picture of a film — it’s simply thinking with a pen.

Well I’m very happy to say that the script for The Lighthouse is finally finished! Thus let me give you the synopsis – before starting off with the storyboard, creating more concrete images of how the story will finally look like;