Whillock: August 2010

Not as smooth a finish as I'd liked but have no idea how to achieve one with acrylics.

Taking a break from the animating for the meantime, as have a few other bits of work going on, but thought I'd find time to have a bit more of a go at modeling with super sculpey, so thought I'd make a small model (20cm tall ish), here it is so far :

Short clip of the first bits of test animation completed, several issues raised:

Shaky first half - the second half was just as shaky but managed to stabilise it in After Effects thankfully.
Watch the light change, not entirely sure how that happened.
Rig is still in shot but can be edited out afterwards.

White/blue moonlight + Orange/warm streetlight

combined:

Feedback always welcome

Back to standard plasticine hands, not too shabby after all, but just a bit delicate, so will have to be careful manipulating them. A light wash of brown and green acrylic makes them blend into the rest of the body pretty well. Both finished characters below, in the pictures.

So, the casting worked much better than anticipated, and with a little trimming, the hands were useable and looking good!

However, as they dried further, they got darker and darker, until they were a deep orange and completely mismatched skin-tone. Having no idea how to go about painting latex without it cracking/peeling etc, it looks like I'm going to have to find some other way to make hands.

Back to the drawing board.

Right, next steps, adding a pliable wire skeleton to the hand mold:

A couple of drops of red and yellow ink to the latex to give it a slightly more fleshy tone. No idea if this will work or not.

Fill up the mold, and wait...

Making the original hand in sculpey around a firm metal tool for support:

Setting the mould in place in a sealed box, and choosing what to use as markers so the two halves fit together well, two polystyrene balls chosen.

Once first half is dry, petroleum jelly is smoothed all over the top to make sure the two halves come apart easily. Next half is then poured on and left to set.

Once dry, the halves are removed from the box and separated:

And voila the mold is complete! Now I need to go and buy some silicone...

Finishing up some final parts of the set, the lorry back and the last bit of paving. The set is as good as done now, except for a splash of blood here and a bit of dirt there. Next major concern is finishing the puppets, and then lighting and framing/layout. Then I'll be good to start animating!

Next job was working back on the armatures, adding a few cable joiners to enable the swapping of body parts if they get worn out etc. Also I wasn't happy with the fingerless blobby hands so this will enable me to make some more to my satisfaction.

And so, here are all the new attachment points, the back of the neck for new heads, the wrist for hands, and the base of the back for support:

Now moving onto making the back of the lorry that'll be visible blocking off one of the streets:

And tiling some of the roof of one side of the street:

First big mistake: spent a while making a nice shutter door out of paper and painted it, only to realise it was entirely the wrong scale and look incredibly out of place. In the bin with that: