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A church hall that has seen better days, shines bravely in a seedy part of town. Here is where our everyday heroes meet their fears. (Or not.)

The plan is for the interior and exterior to be constructed in 3D and the characters will be rendered with cut-out paper of various textures on a multi-plane arrangement.  
Exterior

In the background pictured here as a collage but now planned to be a 3D miniature set, the weeds would also be a 3D paper construction, as will the rubbish blowing around. Since the story takes place in the evening, the exterior background will be purples and greys contrasting with the warm colours of the sandstone church., somewhat affected also by the changing traffic light and the streetlight. The orange glow from the window will provide a focal point.

Lighting ‘from the street lamp’ will illuminate the characters as they go from darkness to light and back again. The effect of shadows is a major advantage of stop-motion animation, and has led to my intention to do a full-on 3D background for the interior and exterior.

The latest exterior view of the church hall shows some of the pic reworked with paper cutouts. This includes the plants, which are from an old pic of my foliage in paper from my paper sculpture company, colored different shades of dusty green.

Part of the wall and the gatepost has also been done to show (for now) how the whole pic will be treated. Lastly, I have scrunched up paper as a placeholder for litter and will probably add a bit more rubbish in the street e.g. simple paper slips, cigarette stubs, as well as some graffiti on the walls. The traffic light is in the first image (top of page) in preparation for Andreas and his fear of crossing the road. That would be  a 3D construction too.


Interior

The aim is to convey a feeling of bleakness in both of the pictures, so that it is only the people who add the warmth.

I didn’t want the interior to be too warm and cosy, since it’s a place where painful work is done; a battleground where people come to terms with themselves.

So there is a sense of rising damp, threadbare facilities, of bravely making the best of the sparse resources available to provide comfort in the form of a hot water urn, coffee, tea bags, milk and biscuits, even though these are all the very cheapest money can buy. That is what compassion and grace under fire look like, when times are hard. 

There will still be quite a few tweaks, till the viewer can almost smell this room. The chairs and carpet for instance will look a bit more worn, and the cups less matching.