Scrawling On Windows

Concept piece of Eliza looking depressed in rainy old England. She is drawing stick figures of animals in the condensation on the window, which would then come to life in a miniature animation. 

Chasing Birds Script

This is the final script for Chasing Birds which we handed in for our Pre Module. If Chasing Birds does get made as a final film next year, this script will have to be revised a lot, but I feel that the basics are there.

Inky Transitions

A concept to show the scene where Eliza climbs down inky vines that have formed from the zebra's stripes. This allows her to transition from one scene to the next without having a cut. I like this image as it has quite a cutout feel to it, like I've grabbed loads of different coloured papers and collaged them together.

Frolicking With Zebras

Concept piece of Eliza running with zebras. 

African Sunset

Here we have various versions of a concept design for Eliza in Africa. I feel the first one works the best as it is the most dramatic lighting wise.

Chasing Birds Revisited

For Pre Production we developed our Chasing Birds story even more. Here are some character development drawings of Eliza. 

Mob Boss Puppet Finished Head

The final Mob Boss head:

Perseus Puppet Finished Head

Here is the final version of Perseus' head, I'm very happy with it :)

Life Drawing... But With Clothes

The model didn't show up for life drawing this week, so we all modeled for each other instead.

Perseus and Mob Boss Puppet Heads

I decided to use a tin foil base as the bulk of Perseus' head as it was a lightweight way to build up the mass and, when compressed, held its shape pretty well. I achieved this by rolling up the tin foil into a slight egg shape and then carved out some eye sockets. I then used plasticine to cover the tin foil.

I added more plasticine, sculpting the shape of the face in adherence to my 2D character design of Perseus. The whole jaw is made of plasticine so it is fully animatable and the brow has quite a thick layer of plasticine on it so this can be manipulated too, in order to create different expressions. I made some eyes, pricking them where the pupil should be, and placed them in the sockets. I decided against having actual lips as it just looked bad, so I will just leave the mouth as a slit which can obviously be moved about and opened when necessary. I used brown plasticine for the eyebrows and placed a thin layer where the hair should be.

For the hair I needed it curly and really wanted to get more texture into it than I could achieve by simply using plasticine. So I grabbed some embroidery thread of brown, black and orangey brown, to get some variation in colour, and wound them tightly round drinking straws, as shown in the image below. I then rubbed PVA glue into them and left them to dry. Once dry, the embroidery thread had become very hard and so I pulled it off the straws and then gently pulled it apart, giving me a mixture of loose curls and barrel shaped segments, which I cut into short pieces. I then pushed this mix into the plasticine, as you can see in the image below. I really liked the texture it gave, so decided to go ahead with the technique.

Once I had pushed the first layer of hair into the plasticine, I needed to build it up in volume. So I coated this layer of hair in PVA and then added another layer. I carried on doing this until the hair was the desired length. Buuuuuuuuuut this is where it all went horribly wrong.....

I had put far too much PVA on and so it had made the thread lose its hardness and become soft and gunky, so it lost all of its shape and became a mash of thread. The colours I had used were far too different in tone and so looked awful, I should have just used the brown thread. I had also accidentally gotten PVA all over the plasticine on the face, making it a weird consistency which cracked up and was no longer pliable, as well as having squashed and distorted the face as I had been pressing the hair into it with too much force. But, refusing to be defeated, I did my best to reshape the hair, pushing the orange and black hair underneath the brown so that you couldn't see much of it. I then pulled off the plasticine from the tin foil base and completely resculpted the face.

This disaster was actually a blessing in disguise as I made the face look so much better than the previous attempt, it looked a lot more like my drawing which I was basing it on. The hair also dried out after a few days and had set in solid curls, as intended. You can see the difference in quality between the photo of my first face (above) and my new one (below). The new one is far more refined and delicate. Now I just need to add one more layer of hair, which I will use a minimal amount of PVA for, just to cover up any of the orange and black which is left showing and to give a bit more height to the hair. He also needs some eyebrows.

Below is the Mob Boss, I created this in the same way as Perseus, however I used plasticine for his hair rather than thread as you're not really going to see it in the shots that the animation calls for. I need to texture his eyebrows but apart from that he's done.

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Once I've tweaked the heads I'll post final turnarounds of them on here.

Making A Stop Motion Armature

After researching different methods of making armatures for stop motion puppets, Paris and I came up with a method that worked with our limited budget and the requirements of the scene we will be animating. It's only a short seen so Perseus the puppet does not need to have a long lifespan.

After foraging for supplies we drew out a to scale plan of how the armature would look. We then used aluminium wire and shaped the wire from the foot, through the leg and up the spine, looping back down the spine and then all the way to the opposite foot, using our drawing as a template. We repeated this process another two times with separate bits of wire. We lined these three bits of wire up with one another and then loosely twisted them together so they became one entity. We then did the same for the arms, running a piece of wire from the start of one wrist to the next, then repeated that with another bit of wire, twisting the two pieces together at the end. 

Next, we got some epoxy putty which we created the bones from. Epoxy is pretty cool stuff (although according to the label it's pretty lethal too) it basically comes in a really soft form comprising of two chemical components which you mix together. Once they are mixed, they begin to harden, so you have a limited time to mold it into a shape you want and then it dries like rock. We sculpted a pelvis first and then the breast plate, which joined the arms to the body.  

We then sculpted the bones on the legs and arms, making sure there were large enough gaps of exposed wire between them so that the wire could bend. The exposed wire acts like the joints and the completely hard epoxy is the bones which makes sure the armature only bends in the right places. The hands came next, using thinner aluminium wire, we ran it around the shape of the hand and fingers, twisting the doubled up wire of the fingers loosely together. The hands were joined to the wrists with more epoxy, creating the shape of the palms in the process. 

So that was how we made our armature! Giving Perseus his very own working skeleton. To pad out the body, giving it the flesh, we used the stuffing you get in cuddly toys and then fastened this to the armature using strips of cloth, you can see in the image below that his leg has been fleshed out in this way. We now need to sort the feet out, so I'll post more armature progress when this has been done, but we are nearly there with it :) I've had a play around with the armature (how could I resist?) and it seems to work really well, so I'm really looking forward to giving it a head and seeing it come to life.

Of Head Experiments And Gouging Out Brains

Since the air drying Fimo was too heavy a substance I decided to experiment with papier mache. I sculpted the head out of plasticine and then used kitchen roll (as it was thin) and PVA glue to coat the shape. It was difficult to get the kitchen roll in the eye sockets as it tended to disintegrate. I left it to dry and then once it was hard I made a small hole in the back of the head and then gouged out the plasticine from the inside with a pick, cleaning out the interior so that I was left with a hollow papier mache head. This was a little odd as I had used red plasticine and it did feel as if I was scraping my little character's brains out. It was very light weight as I desired and I also really liked the wrinkled texture it created. The head seemed pretty tough and durable, holding its shape, so I think it would work for stop motion in that respect. 

The issue however, was that obviously you cannot manipulate the face to animate it. I had thought I could use replacement heads, making several heads that showed the transitions between the different facial expressions needed for the shot and then change them over on the puppet as necessary. This would not work though as for that you need to be able to keep the face the same but change it ever so slightly in increments each time, with creating a new sculpt each time it would be very difficult to keep any kind of continuity, you would need identical copies of the face which you could then slightly alter, but there wasn't a way to do that with the papier mache method. I do really like the texture of these though so I will look into using this somehow in future projects.

This last image was me putting the air dry clay over the top of the papier mache to eliminate the wrinkles, if a smoother face was desirable, while still keeping the head lightweight, rather than the whole thing being air dry clay. Obviously this is of no real use to this project for reasons stated above, but I was just experimenting. 

Perseus' First Foray Into 3D

Paris and I sculpted these two heads from air drying Fimo. Mine is the one on the right. It was just a rough sculpt to get a feel for how my drawing of Perseus would look in the 3D world. The air drying clay was quite a nice material to work with as it takes a long time to set and can be softened by adding a small amount of water if it starts drying out too early, so you can take your time with sculpting. It was very soft and malleable in comparison to plasticine or even the Fimo I am accustomed to which you harden in the oven, so it was very easy to work with. Once the desired shape had been achieved I smoothed the fingerprints out with a little bit of water. The air drying clay was quite heavy and so would not really be practical for a puppet head, which needs to be light so that the puppet can balance and not topple over from being top heavy.

We decided to combine the general face shape of my sculpt with the hair of Paris' in our next attempts, as we thought these were the elements that worked the best. However we need to find a better material to make the heads from.....