My new home

Well for the last three weeks I have been in this room from 10am until 6-7pm. It is my new home, needs a bit of work, maybe a bed in the corner and a shelf for my books.

Might have to move that beast out the corner though

Todays efforts

Well me and Matt had one of those days where everything seemed to be out against us. The Milo seemed to be having a bad day as it decided to go mental twice. The second time it happened, I watched the set lift up on it's back legs and nearly take a light with it. However we persevered and carried on. We managed to get half the shot done which is better than nothing i suppose. It does however look very nice. There is about another 100 frames left to do on it

In the salon

I though I would post up these couple of photos as they how sweet the chaps hair doo was before he went to his trailer for make up and styling

The Wife

With the change of the story I had to whip up a second character. It was originally supposed to be just the one main character battling with his guilt of murdering his brother, but I got stuck with the that story and had to back track to a first idea. So I had the character design already in my head and went straight into sculpting her. I thinkas I have been watching Coraline and Corpse Bride pretty much everyday for the past few weeks there character design has rubbed off on me. So My main influence for her is Nell Vandort from Corpse Bride and Miss Spink and Miss Forcible from Coraline

Without even looking at them for reference I sculpted my head and was very happy with the first attempt.

This sculpt then went in to the mold and cast phase which came out pretty great. Also the armature was sized up and stripped from an old puppet. Another head armature was built for it as well.

She is all finished now and I will post up a finished photo of them both as soon as I get a spare moment while filming.

In full swing

Well That was a stressful week. Getting everything done and ready for shooting took a bit longer than scheduled. I managed to get the puppets done by 7.00am Wednesday morning and with 3 hours sleep and a fun journey into uni with the set and cases of equipment.

For the past 2 days me and the amazing Matt Cusworth have been setting up lights and tweaking computer configurations. I am using the Milo again, which is soo much fun. Today we spent an hour trying different ways to shoot the first shot, exciting stuff.

I was a bit reluctant at first to post pictures or footage of the film in progress but I think I will as from studying the amazingly talented Justin Rasch's blog, I found it is interesting to other people as well as a good way to follow the progress of the film even closer.

I have had to bring the one puppet home with me over the weekend as his eyebrows are peeling off and I am going to try and split a little bit of the hair and add some wire to it too give me the chance to do some follow through movement. It is also a good job that I did bring him home because as soon as I took him out of my bag I realised one of his thumbs had broken, not happy!!!!

So Here we have a shot from when we just about finalized the lighting. I will post pictures up of the finished puppets and set details on tuesday when I get back into uni.
Fun times for everyone!!!

So much to show, so little time

Things are starting to come together very nicely. I am so busy at the moment that I just have not had time to blog whats been going on, so here's a quick look at a couple of things. So I had to change the last head sculpt I did because me being me realized I had sculpted it far too big. So I went back to the drawing board and did a few others that I ended up getting angry at and mushing them up before I could take a picture. Then I landed on the 'one'
(Please Click thumbnails for a larger view)

So with a final head sculpt it was on to my least favourite part of the whole stop motion process, making the mould.

Which was a success first time, yeaaah!! When ever I have made moulds for heads before, they have always gone wrong so I was extremely chuffed that it all went fine

Although the sculpt didn't look too impressed by what he had just been through

I made a head armature as I need this character too have some basic facial movement to get across a few emotions, also I really wanted to try it out and I couldn't see the point in casting in silicone if the puppet is not going make a few big movements.

So with that out of the way I did some final research and went ahead with the exciting bit, which i had been waiting for ever since I started pre production. Casting with dragon skin

Well it didn't really work out very well at all. I think I used way too much pigment or I didn't mix the too parts of the silicone thoroughly enough. Either way I learned a lot and it was fun. I suppose on the plus side if I ever make a zombie film then I have a head for that!!

2nd time went ok, but left very bad air bubble pockets on the nose and forehead. I'm not sure what I did wrong here and could only think that brushing it into the mould first may combat that problem

3rd time was a an almost! But one of the wires inside had come through the skin of the head. Doh!!! I could fell the next one would be a winner. Also On the last cast I realised that making a skull, for the head armature, out of super sculpy was a baaaad idea. That stuff is no where near strong enough to cope with doing the job so I made another one and also made a few adjustments.

4th time was indeed a winner. yay! For this cast I had decided I wanted to try adding a lot less pigment to get a real de-saturated skin tone. It worked out pretty good I think

So with the head done I needed to get on with finishing the armature. I bought a skeletoon armature sometime last year and decided I was going to use it. I had read so many good reviews of their armatures that I was sure it would be perfect. I don't know if I got a defective kit or I was doing things in a stupid way but getting the joints to close up tight was just not happening, although it was only on say 5 out of 15 joints. AnywaysI found some screws that I had to replace their allen key screws for and now its working like a beast. I found some foam to pad it out with and spent a bit of time building it up to get the shape I wanted.

I have had a last minute change in the story which is going to require me building a second puppet which to be fair I know I can do in the time I have before filming starts. He's a wee look at the head sculpt I have just finished for her. It just needs a little bit of cleaning up before she goes into a mould.

And here is a teeny tiny peak of whats going on with the set. It has all pretty much been painted up now and is looking pretty damn amazing. My Dad has gone all out on this one.

So thats all I have time for at the moment. Filming starts next week so I have a few sleepless nights ahead of me but I don't mind, I love what I'm doing and am very excited about it.

New head...maybe

While my Dad has been working on the set I have been sculpting another head as I am still not happy. The last one had a few flaws that I was not loving. So I started again, not really using any reference this time apart from all of the heads I have made previously and also with some designs factors in mind.

I dont know if I am happy with this one now but I am going to use it to do a quick test with my silicone and to also test out a design I have in mind for a head armature.

I have now published a lot of posts dating back to 20th February that I half started and never finished. I think in total you should see around 15 posts that have popped up out of nowhere . Yay :)

More cutting and sticking

My dad has been hard at work over the weekend turning the water colour board into walls amongst many other tasks on the set. He spent hours marking them up into sections of brickwork and then even more hours using his magic wand to make them look like actual bricks. Tomorrow we will be putting everything together, which will be quite exciting as I will get to see exactly how big this beast is.

Lumber jack of all trades

We now have the main parts for this set cut. We are going to be using water colour board for the walls instead of wood as it is going to be easier to bend them and they also have a really nice texture to them.

I decided this set was going to need legs, from my experience after shooting the last film, as I couldn't get hold of a table that was high enough and I kept getting animators back all the time.

Now the fun starts

Well we managed to get he wood yesterday. It was a task and a half to do as I had to carry a huge piece of chipboard ,with a few other pieces strapped to it, from Homebase back to my house. It was sooooo heavy!!! My arms are messed up from it today but oh well it was like a 30 minute workout which cant be bad for me.

My dad got working pretty much straight away, marking up the areas and getting everything ready to go.

Another bonus from today is that I have now have everything for my adventure into the world of proper silicone. It is going to be fun working with it, even though it all cost a small fortune!!!

"Let the wild rumpus begin!"

I will edit this post at a later date with a price list and where I got everything from

A weekend with clay

So I have spent the weekend sculpting yet again. After receiving my chavant clay on Saturday morning I got stuck into another head sculpt. I was inspired by the character design sketches in 'The art of UP' especially the sketches and sculpt of old Muntz. using this him as reference I managed to get this sculpt out.

Also heres a screenshot of all of the reference pictures of muntz I was using

I should hopefully be going out to get the wood for the set tomorrow if it's not pouring down with rain

Another sculpt

I thought the previous sculpts were looking a bit too young so I tried to get the character looking a bit older and more exaggerated. Even though I enjoyed doing it and it looks cool but I don't think it looks right for this film.
I also need to take into consideration that the puppets head is going to have a basic armature inside so the eyebrows need to be bigger to allow more expression and I have also been worrying that if when i move the eyebrow up it may expose too much of the eye which will look a bit unnatural. I think it will be okay if it does it a little as I have studied my own facial movement and as my eyebrow lifts the eyelid follows exposing the eye slightly.

Head sculpts

After drawing out various character designs I wasn't really getting anywhere so I thought I should just bust out the clay and do some concept sculpts and see if i could get any closer to what I wanted. It seems to be working out a lot better. I am going to keep doing them until I'm happy with the design.

Here they are so far(Click to view bigger)

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