She's almost done

The puppet is almost done.

To make the hair: First I rolled out a bunch of the yarn, folded it over a bunch of times in the length I wanted her hair to be, held together the folds on one end with sewing thread, then threaded it through once through the latex on her head. I did this three times with equal bunches of hair and then glue it all down to her head with gorilla glue. I know that must be impossible to imagine from my description, but it really was much better than how I did the hair on the other puppet last time. I am going to be putting her hair into the two buns I described n the other post, but if I had want movable hair I could imagine that I would easily be able to weave thin wire throughout her hair easily with the thickness and curliness of the yarn.

Her eyes were made from sculpy(a mix of the pearly off white and the regular white), which I rolled out into ovals, made a hole with a sewing needle, and baked in the oven. When they were cool, I printed out some varying iris images from the internet and modge podged on the ones I liked. To give them a nice realistic shine, I paint a little nail polish on them before popping them into her head.

The background in these images is the wallpaper that I made for her apartment. I took some images of striped wallpaper off the internet, then mixed a couple types and changed the colors to fit the color I wanted in Photoshop. The yellow flowers in the background are the flowers I will creating a whole meadow out of for the memory sequence. I recently finished up the precise moment by moment plans for the film and will go over that a bit in my next post.










I have two sets to build this week... Her apartment and the field of yellow flowers. I will also be making another outfit for her that is primarily made of teals for the memory sequence in the flower meadow. I should be animating by the end of the week!

Hello my little Poppets

It's been a very busy week. I had to hit the ground running since I am going to be doing this music video in 2 months. I like a bit of a challenge :)

Only one new puppet for this video, since it focuses on the relationship of String Man from the last video, and the new female character in this video... for all intents and purposes let's call her Isadora, Dora for short.

As I said before I want her to look like a fusion of circus/flapper/chinadoll/ballerina. She was actually really fun to sculpt and clothe. I finished the clothing last night and baked her eyes in the oven(not seen yet). Her hair will be two messy buns made out of this crimped black knitting yarn I found at JoAnn's... you'll see. In the drawing she appears to hair 4 buns all over her head.. I was just trying different locations for the buns.. I decided on the lower two. One large one by the nape of her neck below her ear, and one smaller one above and slightly behind her other ear. On the small one I will put a little colorful cloth flower thing.
She has no eyes or hair in any of these pictures. Patience my precious!

Here we go! I will be finishing her up today, and making the sets this week.

As usual, I don't spend much time on sketches for my stop motion... just the general idea...


like before, sculpted the heads from oil based clay... I find it helpful to do a basic sculpt with my fingers with it at room temperature... then put in in the fridge over night and sculpt the details with my tools when it is harder.





the mold, thats a water based clay at the base, then her, then some PAM before I layed in the plaster. That box is made from a trashbag box.



To save time, I only did a good 5 or 6 paperthin layers of Castin Craft liquid latex this time(since it takes so long to dry in the mold(assuming it's because the plaster side doesn't get air to dry faster) this actually proved a bit more taxing because the face was so flimsy that when I filled it with the insulation foam, her face puckered and wrinkled when the foam dried completely. I had to do a bit of plastic surgery to remove her face, paint in a layer of Gorilla Glue to make a skull, then glue it back onto her head




this time around I didn't use foam on my bodies, It was a lot quicker and cheaper to simply wrap her body in pantyhose.






Latex build up on arms and legs, this is her with the foam insulation drying onto the wire of her neck. I also want to note that to do the insulation foam head, it was important to have her neck ONLY 2 twisted 1/16th wires. I tried with 3 this time to strengthen her neck and spine, but her neck wasn't turning smoothly when the foam dried(too much resistance). I simply cut out a wire on the neck part and reglue her head into the foam with gorilla glue.














String man had a body transplant... Because I didn't know he was going to be in more than one video, I didn't make his spine strong enough to withstand such use. I gave him a new stronger spine made out of a stronger wire, wrapped with a smaller wire. Same goes for his left leg. is right leg is 4 pieces of 1/16th aluminum wire wrapped.
Also this time, instead up using balsa wood for the chest and hips, I used plumbers putty. It's stronger and saved time even though it is more expensive.



and a little bonus photo from Siberian that I found. It shows the humorously haphazard setup I used to do the octopus legs coming out of the pig's mouth.

Time to start again

This is a proposal for Howard, definitely subject to change depending on whether it is approved or not- stay tuned...