Armature Hour

Filmmakers Charlie LaVoy and Jenna Pinchbeck here to announce our new Podcast 'Armature Hour'! Tune in every week to watch us develop an epic stop-motion fantasy project from 8000 miles apart.

Help us keep going: https://buymeacoffee.com/armaturehour

🎧 A cozy, behind-the-scenes podcast for artists, animators and storytellers. Put it on while you draw, animate or make your own art!

In Episode 3 of Armature Hour, Charlie dives into Photoshop and begins drawing the landscape of The Howlers, we pull up our brain dumps in the Studio Jenna built, and we start mapping Howl. By the end of a late-night session we have floating islands in the fog, a moon-obsessed cult of Howlers, and the beginnings of a guide character.

In this episode:

• Islands in the fog: a broken world of plateaus above a mysterious abyss
• Two faults: the ancient split, and the one that tears our hero's family apart
• What does our hero actually want when she leaves home?
• The Howlers: a cult that sings to the sky and keeps the pack from asking questions
• A curl of vine over the cliff edge, and the abyss as the messy middle of a healing journey
• Our guide character's inspirations, mirror formations, distant howls, and how to show sound in stop motion

A first guest is on the way!

Hosted by Actor Jenna Pinchbeck and Filmmaker Charlie LaVoy.

Help us keep going: https://buymeacoffee.com/armaturehour

Bumper artwork by Cierra Ramsey: https://www.instagram.com/lvl1artist/

0:00 Deciding To Make A Mind Map
1:18 World Building - Geology and History
8:12 Protagonist Building - Motivation
18:26 Antagonist Building - The Howlers
22:34 Family Separation and Introducing the Guide Character
33:00 Mirror Circles and Distant Howls
39:24 Taking Stock and Posing Questions

🎧 A cozy, behind-the-scenes podcast for artists, animators and storytellers. Put it on while you draw, animate or make your own art!

In this episode we press play on the brain dumps that got this whole project started and react to them live. The story starts to take shape: a fragmented world where the wolves have forgotten why they howl.

In this episode:

• Charlie's "fragments" brain dump: a world, and a culture, broken into pieces.
• What happens to a wolf pack that stops howling, and why that's where our story begins.
• Lost ancestral knowledge and what we've forgotten as humans.
• Jenna pushes back: everyone has a voice now, but we've lost the why.
• An opening scene appears: a failed hunt, and a young wolf whose wild instincts get her into trouble.
• The Dholes return, and how our hero might find them

Do you like hearing our raw voice memos? Tell us in the comments!

Hosted by Actor Jenna Pinchbeck and Filmmaker Charlie LaVoy.

Help us keep going: https://buymeacoffee.com/armaturehour

Bumper Artwork by Cierra Ramsey: https://www.instagram.com/lvl1artist/

0:00 Intro
0:43 About Our Brainstorming Process
2:40 Theme Exploration Part 1: Fragmented World
4:48 Jenna's Reaction
6:50 Theme Exploration Part 2: Having A Voice
9:32 Theme Discussion: Lost Indigeneity
15:06 Where Does the Story Start?
17:05 Benefits of the Brain Dump Writing Technique
18:00 How Jenna Relates to the Fragments Theme
19:29 How Personal Do We Want to Go?
22:34 What Ancestral Knowledge Has Been Forgotten?
24:14 Charlie Gives Jenna Props For Her Push Back
27:18 Exploring Through Wolves What We Have Lost As Humans
31:13 Taking Stock of What We Came Up With

🎧 A cozy, behind-the-scenes podcast for artists, animators and storytellers. Put it on while you draw, animate or make your own art!

Jenna has an idea for a story that she can't shake: a young wolf who dreams of joining the "Howlers", the wolves who howl at the moon every night, until she discovers the ones at the top aren't what she thought they were. In our first episode, Jenna pitches this seed of an idea to Charlie, and from 8000 miles apart they start pulling it apart and putting it together.

In this episode:

• Where the idea came from: a decade of Jenna searching for her own voice as a singer and voice actor
• The Dhole, an endangered wild dog of South and Southeast Asia with a voice unlike any wolf's
• Charlie's journey from camcorder kid in upper Michigan to fifteen years of indie film in New Orleans, burning out, and getting pulled back in through animation
• Why leaving home isn't enough on its own... what is our hero really chasing?

Hosted by Actor Jenna Pinchbeck and Filmmaker Charlie LaVoy.
Bumper artwork by Cierra Ramsey: https://www.instagram.com/lvl1artist/

Help us keep going: https://buymeacoffee.com/armaturehour

0:00 Intro
0:52 Jenna's Initial Story Idea
12:31 Charlie's Initial Reaction and Resonance
18:26 Troubleshooting Story Structure
23:28 Connecting Theme, Concept and Conflict
31:19 Outro

🎧 A cozy, behind-the-scenes podcast for artists, animators and storytellers. Put it on while you draw, animate or make your own art!

In Episode 4 of Armature Hour, we pick the mind map back up and start answering the questions it left us with. How do the wolves eat when they’ve stopped hunting? What really happened when the world broke apart? And who in this world can actually talk to who?

In this episode:

• How do the wolves get their food?
• Are the "Howlers" a product of their environment? Fear, stubbornness, and instincts that curdle into staying put
• The fault, rethought: not a parting of the plateau but a sinkhole, dropping half the world into a jungle below the clouds
• Who talks to who: cross-species communication, the aye-aye’s tapping finger, and fungal networks

Hosted by Actor Jenna Pinchbeck and Filmmaker Charlie LaVoy.

Help us keep going: https://buymeacoffee.com/armaturehour

Bumper artwork by Cierra Ramsey: https://www.instagram.com/lvl1artist/

0:00 Intro
1:52 Creative Troubleshooting - How Do The Wolves Get Their Food?
5:14 Clarifying Geology, History and Forces of Antagonism
15:43 Cross Species Communication
22:12 Shifting Between Worlds and Synesthesia
27:25 Naming Characters - Our Process
33:12 Selecting Content for the Proof of Concept Shortfilm
35:54 Outro

🎧 A cozy, behind-the-scenes podcast for artists, animators and storytellers. Put it on while you draw, animate or make your own art!

In Episode 5 of Armature Hour, we step out of the world of Howl and map the road to actually making it. Charlie walks us through our development plan, from a one-sheet and a proof-of-concept short to finding a studio, raising the money and pitching a feature or series. Then we look at how some of our favorite projects made the same journey: Scavengers Reign, Wallace and Gromit, Adventure Time, Anomalisa and The Dam Keeper.

Hosted by Actor Jenna Pinchbeck and Filmmaker Charlie LaVoy.

Help us keep going: https://buymeacoffee.com/armaturehour

Bumper artwork by Cierra Ramsey: https://www.instagram.com/lvl1artist/

0:00 Intro
2:27 The One-Sheet - A Bird's Eye View
3:46 The Teaser / Proof of Concept Short
7:12 Cost Discovery - How Screwed Are We?
10:43 Teaser Production and Packaging
12:17 Parallel Threads
19:23 Process Study: Scavengers Reign
28:22 Process Study: Wallace and Gromit
31:02 Process Study: Adventure Time
34:28 Process Study: Anomalisa and The Dam Keeper
36:27 Finding Patterns in the Process References
39:14 Conclusion