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!
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.
today I cut together a new demo reel that includes footage from my last two projects. I am not entirely sure I love it... I may have liked the upbeat tone of the other one better... but alas... I like it in a different way than before. Criticism is always welcome.
EDIT: Hey folks- I needed to take own the video online because the band Minster Hill is gearing up to release their new batch of songs and promotion for the song and video.. be patient! You will be able to see it again in the future and possibly buy a full quality version of it through the band. Til then, just enjoy the demo reel :)
Here it is! I wish you could see the full quality here, but the internet is not a friendly place to the quality of video... this is better than youtube though.
Howard, please make any notes for what you would like changed or adjusted with approximate minutes and seconds so I know where you are talking about. Hope you enjoy!
It's not much, but I was putting this 20 second intro online so my sound designer could have it for creating sound and I thought "what the heck, why not put it on the blog?" The little titles are notes to him, it also doesn't have the 10 second credits in the lower left hand corner yet, but it's the first sequence for you to see!
I am about 75% done color correcting and time tweaking- should see a finished product(ready for final approval) before the weekend :)
I have finished animating 75% of the shots - only one more week to go! I am very happy with how my raw footage is turning out... generally my technique is to animate as best I can, then tweak the timing in after effects my stretching and shrinking the shots where I think it seems too fast or too slow. Rarely I will reshoot if time allows, which I already know I have to do for only one of these shots. I try to animate so that I only have to speed things up if anything, so that I have more frames to work with.
I don't have pics or video of near all the footage I have shot- but I hope this is at least appetite wetting.
Most of these shots have not been tweaked to a finish yet in after effects for timing- but they are maybe 70% done in regards to timing and color. I like to do a general pass while I am in the animating process, then finely finish everything after I have all my footage done.
Here is a mix of stills and video. Sorry for the TERRIBLE youtube quality- it's youtube, what can I say. The originals are crispy and clear. It gets somewhat better with their "High quality" button, but not much.
For some reason I think a lot of frames got cut out because it doesn't look nearly as choppy in the file I uploaded. I am including links where you can download a better quality version too.
In general chronological order..
so after the girl gets pulled into the carcass of a dead pig by the arms of an octopus(which is being shot at the end), she wakes up to see these folks standing over her
The better quality download.... http://blip.tv/file/get/Playdohartist-testFootage887.avi
this is a close up of the bee lady looking at her on the operating table
then things start to get a bit weird as we cut back and forth between the scene on the "operating table" and a scene where the girl wakes up on the ground to find herself in an empty cavernous room. There is a wooden box in front of her. She gives it a quizzical look.
She crawls to the box and opens it to find it full of different eyeballs. She picks one up.
The interesting glowy fuzzy look here is obtained by using my fisheye adaptor lens, and then zooming in so that the image gets distorted. I use it for the POV shots.
she looks into the eyes
through the first eye she see the bee lady moving about "playing" music on the flowers.
The video cuts back and forth from shots of the girl at the operating table and her looking through the different eyeballs. Each eyeball shows her a different view of one of the 3 characters. The next is time pig man. he rolls around in circles like a mad man banging on clocks like drums.
next is string man who walks around in this room full of floor to ceiling strings plucking the strings to hear the vibrational sound they make.
here is a short clip, some of the vibrational instruments from pig time man are at the end of the clip.
at the sight of this she gets really disturbed and faints. The eyeball drops out of her hand and rolls on the floor.
we cut back to the operating room and the bee lady pokes the girls leg to see that she can't move her legs. They all look at one another, deciding something needs to be done. This is the string man's look of approval. There are two shots here, I just filmed them consecutively.
So that's what I have for today. I am not happy with how youtube is playing the footage, I will have to find a better way to show it next time. Something gets lost when youtube compresses it for the internet.
I am so excited!!!! I have shot 64 seconds of footage in the last 4 days, which is excellent considering my decrepit state of health. I can finally talk again(though I won't be karaokeing for another week or so) and I am getting my energy back.
This is a dead pig. He is made from clay, with a mix of acrylic paint and beige spray paint. You can actually see his storyboarded self in the lower left corner
in the short intro, I have some establishing shots of the farmhouse. This is one of them. The light from the window crawls up the wall and over this picture to signal a passage of time.
aha! Yes, that is the puppet, masking taped to a chunk of granite. For most of the dining room shots, you can't see the girl's feet, and also she was a tad short to make the shots work(you couldn't see her behind the table when she was standing). I was feeling a bit anxious and not wanting to deal with tiedowns in conjunction with her lack of height... so I just took this granite sample and taped her to it. The granite is very heavy so she stayed in place... and the tape was shockingly strong.
a headless farmer
Pig getting placed
I realize this all looks very sloppy,lol. Such a sad sagging backdrop... but you can't see that part in the shot.
a shot from between the dslr and the cheapo videocamera(used for grabbing frames into animator dv so I can have a reference for each move - I use the onionskinning option but don't use animator dv for anything else)
another establishing shot of the crucifix and the little kerosene lamp. there is actually a match stuck into a blob of clay BEHIND the lamp that was lit. I couldnt put the flame in the lamp, it was too small. But this way I got the flicker and reflections of light in the lamp I wanted.
the first establishing shot inside the house. This is that grandfather clock I made. The face of the clock is from a watch. The lens I am using is an opteka fisheye lens that attaches to my nikkor lens. I zoom in the give it that weird hazy circular distortion. The shot goes from a complete out of focus shot to this. The effect the lens has is really beautiful and eerie. When it is out of focus the lights and colors look like paint.
These are frames from the film, yet again I am playing around with color curves in all of them with photoshop- still deciding on what colors I want to have in the final edit. Just quick color touching.
this milk is actually hair gel mixed with white paint. It oozed beautifully to allow me to just put my camera on continuous shooting as it dribbled out of the milk pot and onto the floor. It gets knocked over by the farmer's head which the girl drops on the table after it falls off his body. Complicated. Don't try to understand now. This is a surreal video.
Next I animate her getting swallowed into the pig after being pulled in by these octopus tentacles that come out of the dead, singing, pig's mouth. Just normal stuff, you know.
