Aim: To produce a character and prop for a stop motion film. Animate the character interacting with the prop in a "Americas Got Talent" style clip. Edit and add sound to the film too.
Materials: Wire, K+S Tubing, Miliput, Latex, Silicone, Resin, Model Magic, Fabric, Magnets, Rostrum room within the college containing 2 camera set ups and green screens, Video editing software, Sound effects catalog on college computers.
Skills Learnt: Character design, Storyboarding, Armatures, Slosh mould, Latex dipping and how painstakingly slow it is, Miniature clothes sewing, Stop motion animation, the usefulness of magnets.
Project Highlights: I was really looking forward to this module, and I was lucky that my Character "Busty St Clair" came about so quickly. Her story was she was going to break a glass with her voice (as she was a large opera singer) but the glass refuses to break, she then smashes the glass herself and shuffles off stage. The first problem with that is you require multiple heads or mouths. I went for heads, that were attached to her neck via magnets. Her Wig, made of model magic came off easily and fitted onto all heads.
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| The 3 heads made in Sculpey (later cast in resin cos of weight) |
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| One of the heads being used to model Busty's Wig |
A lot of time was spent latex dipping her limbs after the armature was completed. I had a nice little clothes line drip dry process going on. While limps were drying I was either sculpting and moulding the 3 heads, or making a miniature dress for her to wear. There were going to be gloves, but that was going a bit far.
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| Busty's legs after a few dips on the thighs. |
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| Busty's Chest, and arms. Theres a magnet behind her necklace for her heads and the wig covers she shoulder joints. |
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| Head #1 in place, but wobbly but the wig helps steady it. That roll of fruit pastilles is sitting in one of her head molds behind her. |
I added magnets to her legs to help her stand....sadly that didn't work as well as planned. Given her thin legs, she would've been better with a support but that wasn't an option. I was also Told the base of the green screen was going to be magnetic. That didn't exactly happen, or rather a sheet of metal under the wooden screen didn't exactly work, so she had to be placed on a raw sheet of metal.
My favourite part was animating the wobbling of the stool (her prob) and the smashing of the glass. I had 2 glasses, one whole, and one semi smashed. I'm more proud of that than Busty herself. The Rostrum Room itself was fun, we went in pairs, and took a screen each, only one of the ancient cameras had onion skinning so god help you if you hit tapped off the camera. One person was set to capture the images, and the person who's model it was was set to animate their char and say it they were happy with a shot or not. Quite painless really, provided everything goes right.
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| Animating away! (my friend Ro was on Capture Duty!) |
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| How did that last one look?? |
After that we'd use a hard drive to take the images from the computers in the Rostrum Room, to our own, on a separate college computer. Edit the images down, removing any mistaken images, hands, etc. and then add in sound if you wanted to. The plan was to have one of the lecturers change the green screen into a stage setting for us, but that never happened.
Sadly there was no opera lady singing sound effect, so I only have applause and the glass smashing....
Anyway, without further ado...
(not sure how to embed a vid yet!)
I was really happy with how my heads worked out. The magnetics could've worked a little better, but for my first try I was very pleased. I did lose marks though, because there were two lecturers with us on this module, and I got conflicting ideas on what to do for the head, and for some reason that one wasn't a good one. Twas a bit confusing.
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