I am now half way through animating my last group of shots: the book. I firstly shot the writing and page turn shot.
Here is a test for the writing:

I then needed to shoot the tree blowing followed by it 'growing'. Here is a test for both of these shots:

I used fishing wire to create the tree blowing which I will need to remove in After FX. The hands in this test show how the tree should grow, at what speeds during different stages and twisting whilst growing.

I shot the tree growing last as I need to destroy it to be able to do so, which meant that I had to get it in one shot. This would be filmed in reverse so the tree would originally look like it is destroying itself, but I will then reverse the images so it plays as if the tree is growing.

The tree scene before reversed:

I spent most of the day setting up the shot for my first scene where the Librarian is up a ladder placing books back onto the shelf.
An initial problem that I came across was the height of the puppet in contrast to the bookshelf in the set up of this shot. The bookshelf needed to take up the whole height and width of the screen but I couldn't achieve this without bending the puppets knees so he would be in the right place for the shot. This caused difficulty because of the ladder and I was having to angle the body which didn't then look right on camera. I found a platform that was essentially a miniature animation table which I could tie down the bookcase whilst raising it slighlty higher so that the puppet would be at the right height without his knees having to be bent (see picture).

Once the shot was set up I wanted to do a few tests with the prototype to warm up my animation skills again. I ended up doing two tests: one shot on ones and the other on twos. I was extremely glad I did this as it has helped me realise what shots I might want to shot on one's (quicker movement e.g. a fast hand swipe) and what I might want to shot on two's (the majority of scenes including this one, it is more controlled and suits the Librarians character better.)

I had made a few different prototypes of possible puppet heads for the librarian puppet. I particularly like two of these, the first is made of balsa wood, the second is a sculpey base which is then covered in a very fine foam layer with latex. I wanted to test how these would look under camera with lighting as I was unsure whether the features and detail and the heads would show up well enough on screen.

Here's how they looked:

I'm having a bit of a struggle at what one I liked more. I particularly liked working with the balsa wood, which is extremly light so isn't detrimental to the movement of the puppet and gives nice angular detail to the face; however I like the texture of the foam and book pages, but the head wa extremely heavy on the puppets long neck.

I think what I need to do now is try adding writing or book pages onto the balsa wood head and see what this looks like.

I had built two armatures, both with different sized wire to see which I would prefer animating with; however straight away I realised I didn't even want to try with the smaller sized wire as the puppet was getting a lot of bounce back when even just trying to position him on screen. These tests are all therefore with the one armature.

I thought I would try animating the scene where he's at the bookcase throwing books to the floor and also the scene where he walks across the screen dragging the book along behind him. My animating skills are currently VERY rusty so I am now getting back into the swing of things.

I almost cried when I first watched this back. It became obvious to me that I was trying to add in lots of unnecessary movements which were complicating the point of the movements he was actually trying to make. Also the speed of the book falling was way too slow.

I felt like the animation worked a lot better with simpler movements, I also tried leaving more frames in between movements so as not to feel rushed.

This test was the most controlled so far. The one problem I did find was that not having a physical bookshelf to reach out to and pluck a book from meant that I was unsure where his hand should exactly be at that point to the action seems slightly confused. I will do another test with props in the the near future.

I have never animated a puppet with tie downs before, only pins so this was a completely new experience. I felt like he was shuffling more than walking but in a way this adds to his characteristic of being an old, miserable man. I'm going to try this again but swap the hands over so that the hand holding the book is on the side of the camera, I think the swinging arm might not be so in the way if it were further from the camera.