As our ShelterBox idea involved making a hybrid between stop-motion and 2D, Ting and I started building the set for our short film. We decided to make the sandcastles with clay and coat it with sand for the 'houses' and draw 2D windows & doors on it. For the beach setting, we stuck with the idea of painting cardboard for the skies and doing paper mâché for the base of the sandy beach and covered it with sand afterwards.

For the sandcastles, the process of making it went like that:

Step 1: Roll out a ball of aluminium foil and leave it aside. (To use less clay & make sure the sandcastle is lightweight)

Step 2: Roll a chunk of clay into a ball.

Step 3: Flatten the ball of clay out, like you're making a dumpling! Place the ball of aluminium foil in the centre and knead the clay around the foil, making sure that it's concealed, until it looks like a potato.

Step 4 **if necessary!: Roll out clay to add around the base of the potato to make it into a sandcastle shaped building.

Step 5: Adding the castle indentations by using an x-acto knife to mark the groves and then cut it out one by one. Next, we needed to make the damaged sandcastles to show the aftermath of the tsunami.

Do exactly what has been done to the normal sandcastles, except that after it's partially dry, pull apart little chunks from different sections of the sandcastle, stretch it a little, bend it a little and add in the indentations.

Completed pieces!

After they're covered in sand.

Layering for the sandy beach setting with cardboard and PVA glue and a touch of sand.

Ting (Director) painting the background setting.

We realised that our setup was too small to just locate everything properly but here goes:





We took all the photos needed for all our shots as we've already established how they were all going to look like. Here are just some of it:




I know we could have done better for the sets and all, and I wished we did. Overall I wasn't satisfied with these despite all the hard work put into it. Let's just hope it blends in with our 2D animation.