A long time since my last post.....I always blame Spain for this, and I've being there for the past 3 weeks, so I have the perfect excuse! I must say I have also been ill for the last two weeks...and I haven't had much time to work.
Nevertheless, I am back in England, with my batteries charged after a little music festival,
and of course after finishing what seems to be like the final animatic of my short film.Sorry I can't show any of that at the moment cause it would be like showing the film, but with the worst quality possible in every aspect.
So, I am just going to show a couple of pics so you can see how it is all coming together...I hope you like them:
So I mam still fighting with my essay, but I must say, the two authors have being very helpful with me and they both allowed me to interview them!! So I think, the teacher will like that. I'll be starting to get some tests of the painted puppet very soon from London. I'll keep you posted, and sorry for the big brake!
Hi, sorry I've being absent for a couple of days, but yesterday I spent it researching for the essay I have to write about two authors to whom I relate my work with. I finally chose them :
Tom Otterness (a sculptor ) an John Zerzan (an anarchist) . For those of you who don't know them, here is some work of Otterness:
And here you can learn a lot about John Zerzan (and other intersting topics)this is just the trailer, if you are interested, I strongly recommend to see the whole documentary :
Ok, so, today I headed directly to the stop motion studios at Uni, to test some camera moves, it took me a couple of tries, but in the end, I think the result is quite pleasing. This is more or less what the firs 15 seconds of my film are going to look like (spoiler alert!!!) I hope you like it:
Also, I have a couple of good news, It is very likely that I will be giving a workshop for Ba students, here at Uni, on Foam Latex Puppets!! I am very excited about it. And I've being invited to France to animate a couple of shots for my old Stop Motion teacher's short film.That is even more exciting!!!
Not much more to say, this days I'll be focusing on the essay writing, so I won't update the blog to tell you how my boring text is going. Nevertheless, any animation progress, you'll be the first to know about!!
Yes!!! today, after a failed trip to London (I didn't get passed the train station in Farnham ) I started watching all the behind the scenes from Tim Burton's stop motion film. It got me a little sad / anxious / motivated, so I decided to give the puppet it's first expression test. I am in my room, so the technology surrounding me is very, very poor. One little light, a smashed Canon, and a cheap tripod. No video feedback (so I've animated "blind")
but I got to see more or less what the puppet will be able to do once the full armature is well in place. Also I already noticed a couple of errors in the head armature that I will fix for further ones.
Here is a little animation then . The puppet just moving his face really, there's not much acting I have to admit!!:
I now is not very cool, but , HELL, it feels good to see the potential of the puppet!!
There is not much more to say now. Only a little reminder that last week , while I was in Madrid, I helped in the shot of an advert for a Coca Cola competition with my friends of Repate...well here it is:
Nothing more for today, tomorrow, I'll try to put some hair on the puppets head, and make a cooler animation. It's a pity the upper lip and left eyebrow don't work......just imagine if they did!!
Have a nice weekend!
I am cooking some foam latex on Monday (as long as it gets delivered in time... ) So I wanted to get everything ready for then. My fingers are in pain, and my skin is falling apart,I am very tired, but it was worth it.
I have made a lot of armatures today, and good looking ones too.
First thing I did though, was open the mould I left curing yesterday to see the final result:
Then I took the plasticine hands out, and washed the mould with plenty of water:
Now I was ready to make armatures that will fit in this mould in the future:
And after making some hands, I've made a couple of heads:
Those two wires that stick to the side with a brown blob in the end, are the wires that are going to make the puppet smile (I hope). And I am not putting eyes in this armature 'cause I've decided to put the blobs of clay directly in the mould, to place the eyes after the latex is cooked.
After the heads, I went for the body, but this time, I made the final design of the armature, with replaceable hands and head:
And to sum up, this is a picture of today's work, all very tidy!!:
Before I finish this post, I wanted to point out the top pair of hands on the top of the previous picture, basically this ones:
Notice they have a couple of nuts in the armature. This is because in early stages of preproduction, while I was doing some animation tests and I came across this shot:
I think the animation is not bad, but if you look at the hands, the keep moving around all over the place. In order to maintain them always in the same position, I needed the same tie downs I use for the feet. I simply chose a smaller size nut so they fitted inside the mould along with the armature. When I start animating (hopefully soon) I'll show the tie down system (to those of you how are not animators).
.........I just got an e-mail from my foam latex suppliers saying they are out of stock until the 18th of April, this makes me very sad...and a bit stressed out!!! My schedule is getting a bit tight....but anyway, this means that I have to get ready (make A LOT of armatures) for as soon as I came back from Spain on the 28th of April, make three consecutive runs of foam latex and rush to London to get everything painted..Then I'll go back to Spain to shoot the film!!
Nothing more for today...just have a nice weekend and be aware, I might be animating expressions in my puppet tomorrow!!!
