Whillock: January 2011

Havn't been keeping up with my blog posting as much as I'd liked but hopefully that'll all change in the next week or so as I have plenty to be getting on with. Just been slowly progressing with planning stages and making props for the piece. The plot is coming together nicely now, with some concrete ideas down. Stay tuned.

David Colman is an amazing artist, and have luckily been able to purchase his book last year, it's an absolute gold-mine of information on life drawing, and definitely inspired the direction I want to take with mine and the upcoming project brief.

These are a few shorts that have inspired me lately, from a mix of students, small companies and large companies, and all different media.

Close But No Cigar

Out of a Forest

Crater Face

Meet the Sniper

Thought of You

The TV Show

Love and Theft

Incredibly trippy and works wonderfully with the music and roller-coasters through a variety of emotions.

Moon Boy

A short film about a boy who wishes for better things - very relatable.

This is just a guide on how I go about making moveable hands for my stop-motion character. I thought I'd post it up in the hope that it could help other people out.

First of all you're going to need a mould, so see my other guide on how to make one if need be.

Next, get some super sculpey/plasticine in one halfof that mould, whatever colour you'd like your hand to end up. Be sure to really wedge it in there, get all the gaps nice and tight.

Now, on top of this layer you've built up, lay the soft wire 'bones' of the hand that will allow it to be a bit stronger and hold its shape. You can see two types I use here, the simple hoop usually suffices if you're using a medium that holds together quite well, but you may want to go for the individual finger bones if you want something that's going to last a little longer. Just make sure the wire you're using is nice and soft! Push them down below the surface of the scupley.

Next, lay down some more sculpey on top of the 'bones', making sure to cover it all, don't worry too much about neatness at this stage, just making sure that the 'bones' are well covered, with excess sculpey if need be. It's better to do too much than too little here. Then place the other half of the mould on top, and squeese firmly (but don't break the mould).

Carefully open up that bad boy, and marvel at the little hand you've created. You may need to trim away and excess 'squeesed out bits' around the edge.

Next, using the strongest point of the arm, carefully peel out your hand. Then its just a case of trimming the wrist off, to expose the 'bone' and smoothing out any rough spots.

And there you have it, a hand ready to fasten directly onto the character, and easily replaceable as it deteriorates!

So I set myself the task of making the set sturdier (as discussed in the last post) but also transportable incase I needed to move it about. The easiest way I could think to do this was to keep each main segment separate and make it free-standing but self-supporting. So now it has four main pieces (not including props like the truck etc); the floor, the building, the wall and the background. I've built a bunch of struts and supports in such a way that each piece can simply be slotted onto its place on the base, and each supports the adjacent pieces, no gluing or fixing required. All it all, a success so far, and it all seems pretty sturdy.

Few progress shots from bracing the set with some old canvas frames, to try and get rid of the warping from the layers of glue, and it seems to be working so far so fingers crossed! It's been a slow process of PVA glue, clamping to hold things in place while they dry and then hot melt glue-guns to finish off a few edges and struts to hold the whole thing together and make it nice and firm. I've gone a bit overkill as I'd rather make it too strong than have it collapse/deform halfway through the project. It's a bit of a bodge job, but I figure that gives it a bit more character.