First Test Animation Of Aluki

Wow. Just wow. This was soooooooo incredibly awesome to make. I took my little puppet into the new stop motion room and was shown how to use the Dragonframe software. I was then left to my own devices. I decided to get Aluki to enact when she waves goodbye to Anik in the first scene. 

I'm very pleased with how this turned out, I think I've got some performance in there. If I were to do it again I would do some things differently, such as make her head cock towards camera rather than away from it and give her plaits some movement when she bows her head. But this just shows you need to plan the animation really thoroughly before you do it. 

The main issue though, was the tie downs. I had put M3 nuts in the feet, as I already had some of these lying around. I did not have the M3 wingnuts, studding and washers to go with them though. I should have guessed that locating these things would be hard seeing as of all the difficulties I'd had in obtaining the other materials for the puppet. But I thought I could just pop down to B&Q and pick some up. Oh how wrong I was. It turns out you need like a dedicated engineering shop to get hold of these things, which nowhere in or near Falmouth has. I couldn't order them online because I needed them the next day, as this was my only chance to animate my test shot. Luckily the media store at campus had some random parts floating around and I managed to concoct something that would make do for the time being. This all meant that I could only tie down two of the foot parts at once and only if they were spread far apart as the washers were too big. I hadn't glued the nuts into the feet as I didn't want to finalize the size before I had the other parts of the tie downs (it made sense at the time!) so the nuts kept falling out of the feet. It all was basically fine while I was animating the wave, but when I tried to make Aluki turn it all started to fall apart, which is why the turn is quite messy. I did 

want to attempt a walk but there was no way I could without having the correct tie downs.

Despite the tie down problem I loved animating this so much. Stop motion is literally incredible.