And So the Journey Begins

Well, I've been spending the last couple of months and am currently working as a lighting intern at the awesome Cuppa Coffee Studios, working on the new show Glenn Martin, DDS. It is a great, eye-opening experience into the world of professional, stop-motion production; not to mention, an excellent resource of knowledge and insight into the film that lies ahead of me.

Personally, I'd rather not post too much about the film I'm going to make next next year, just because I don't want to give too much away until it's complete. But, from time to time, I think I'll probably give out little nuggets of design or something.

And on that note, here's something that probably doesn't make any sense to anyone, but I'd like to log it on this here blog to see how drastically I stray over the course of pre/production.

And did I mention, it will be produced in the wonderful medium of stop-motion animation?

A New Season

I have been pretty sketchy on my blog posts lately. More specifically, no blog posts at all. I have been under the dominate grip of production for a little short film titled 'The Auction'. Some still are included below, but this is all I can show at this point.

So the summer begins and my outlet of creativity is free to wonder the streets. So much time and so little to do ... scratch that, reverse it.

I will begin to post more often regarding my ongoings. And most importantly, I can return to the world of stop-motion / experimental film making.

I present, 'The Auction', in minimal still form.

Action Analysis

Action Analysis project from last semester.

Still needs proper shadow compositing/drop shadow.

Puppet Test!

I couldn't help myself.

Simple walk test with a little bit of jazz at the end.

Voila

So there's some things crooked here and there, but overall, not too bad for a first attempt.

Now the magic happens.

Getting There...

Clothes are starting to come together.

Also, an 18mm lens makes anything look cool.

Puppet Progress

I'm just on the brink of getting the puppet's clothes started. I need to get out and buy some various paints (thus the flesh coloured shoes at the moment). As soon as I get those, I'll paint up everything and off I'll be with the mini-tuxedo. Oh, and I still need to construct the mustache, but I'm just waiting until his head is all done first.

Santa was kind enough to bring me a wonderful webcam, which is capable of actually shooting in colour and non-grainy resolution! I took some quick photos with it.

Holiday Puppet Making

So I've decided to dedicate most of my holiday time to making an actual puppet with all the bells and whistles. I started a few days ago and have most of the armature and sculpting done!

In the end I'm going for an elderly-type magician with no facial features except for a huge mustache. I'm a little rusty on my miniature suit making skills but hopefully I'll be able to pull off a clean looking tux for him.

Anywho, I hope to have him done in a few days and I'll have two weeks of animating time before heading back to school.

Pretty much the same construction style as the previous test puppets, except for the added bonus of the Sculpey head, floral wire fingers (the armature wire was too stiff), and I've gone and wrapped most of everything (after baking) with floral tape to seal everything up. The floral tape works especially well with wrapping layers of tin foil to keep it all tight. Oh, and the wires sticking out of the front of his face are what will become his mustache armature.

More to come!

Stop Mo'gician

A leg snapped off on my most recent puppet so I aborted doing some walking/jumping moves for the moment and used my half puppet to my advantage. I set up this little scene and just went with it, with very little planning except for what I generally wanted. I've seen enough professional magicians do some shuffles to kind of know where I was going.

Overall, a very fun little piece and I'm rather happy with the outcome (although I would like to have had the head drop at the end lead into another move). I'm going to leave the puppet how it is and probably keep going with this one; I really want to try some outlandish shuffles.

I'm quite excited about how much I've improved since first moving a puppet about two months ago.

(And yes, he is actually cutting the deck)

Hammer Space

Playing more with the idea of traditional techniques brought over into stop-motion, I thought it'd be fun to throw a little 'where did that come from' before a bat smash.

I still haven't got proper magnet feet, so I just used some paper to hide the armature and made some plasticine shoes.

Gone Fishin'

I figured a puppet without feet isn't a big deal as long as you hide them; just did a quick test of a fishing activity. I ended up just wrapping the leg wires under the table and duct taping them put.

I put this one more under the 'test' category. It's alright, but I'm still trying to get a hang of how long things really take when you're tackling one frame at a time. Parts could have been slower here and there, but oh well.

Also, I threw in some tin foil water for the fun of it, which turned out to be kind of annoying, really: moving the foil every frame. I often forgot and had to go back.

Puppet!

After the first attempt with the monstrosity that was the first puppet (ie. wire with more memory than an elephant and pieces of duct tape), I decided I didn't want to put up with that kind of nonsense and built something better.

Here's something MUCH more manageable.

Made out of 1/16 and 1/8 armature wire and plumbers' epoxy. Turned out kind of creepy, especially with the jack skellington-esque face, but that makes it better in my opinion.

All I need are some 'rare earth magnets' to finish off the feet and to fashion some type of stage and I'll be on my way to animating this thing non-stop on my own time.

Some More Stop-Motion

As of late, I've set up a pretty sweet stop-motion station in my room. All I need is to build a more elaborate set, but that will probably come once I build a puppet with more than some awful wire and duct tape. But I felt like that shouldn't stop me and I put together a quick test.

The station:



Puppet test:

Camera Moves and Walking Robots

First up, here's a vertical pan move that I completed last year. I still need to put a layout to some two character dialogue from last year as well, so I think I'm going to do an interior of the saloon and blend the two projects together.



And here is a simple walk cycle done in Maya. I'm really happy with how the arms turned out; I had to ovecome a bit of a learning curve to get a snappiness from one position to the next, as opposed to a mechanical transition.

This is a simple playblast, but when I learn a bit more on rendering and stuff, I'll make up a fancy version for sure. Also, I take zero credit for this rig. I've seen it around a lot, so I'm assuming that it's okay to use it for these purposes.

Boing-gg-g

Another stop-motion experiment!

I was interested by the 'effects' section of Eric Goldberg's new book, so I thought I'd try out some 'boing' type effect with some wire.

It's unfortunate my 'webcam duct-taped to the top of a soda bottle' set-up kind of jumps, but I think I made due with what I have.



Also, here's a quick ball bounce test. A bit tricky due to the lack of a controlled armature (actually, the ball was pretty much waving around the whole time), but it holds together, I suppose.