Armature Making..

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!!!

Sunday, Sunny Sunday

First of all, I wanted to say, that the blog is one month old today, and has had 500 visits in the first 30 days of live, which makes me very happy!! To that, you have to sum that the Sun has being shining today in Farnham.
 I started the day doing some juggling in the main street to make some extra money. After that, I went to the fields with some friends to enjoy the sun, and I don't know why but I thought of Andy Goldsworthy, one of my favourite artists (I strongly recommend his documentary: Rivers and Tides) and we came up with a piece of Land Art I wanted to share with you: The Dizzy Daisy

When I got home, I started making what I think will be the final design of the head armature, as well as some ultra resistant hand armatures (I hope this ones don't snap so fast because I've covered the wire with protective plastic tubing)

Tomorrow I am doing some foam latex, so we should have some interesting stuff going on, also, I've already sent a foam latex head and some hand for the make up artists to start making paint tests...hopefully it wont be to long before I have a completely finished puppet!!
Let's hope the week starts well

The Head armature..

Without a doubt, the most tricky, precise and difficult I have come across in this project, but today, I think I finally made a decent one. (After 5 attempts it was about time) . I must say it took me all day, with a little frustrational break, so I hope it works when the moment comes on Friday. Here are the pieces I had to fit very precisely into the 3 cm head.

And here is the ugly result ...finished but not dried, so I'll cut off all the remaining wire tomorrow:

Before deciding what wire to use and where to put it, I made some test with the first foam latex head that had the armature in the slightly wrong place:

I found a couple of things, first of all, the cheek bones don't really give any extra expression to the character, so there is no need to waste space with them. The upper lip is to thin to place wire in it, so I fixed that in yesterday's mould. Also, I have an upper and lower lip, but if I want him to smile, there is nowhere to pull from, so I've put to wires in the sides of the mouth for this purpose. The eyebrows worked pretty well, but I am making a slight adjustment: in stead of one wire for both eyebrows, I've given each eyebrow it's independent wire. 

 I want a completely functional puppet this Friday, so I need to have everything ready by tomorrow night. Until then !!

Foam Latex Day

 This morning I woke up at about 9a.m, with a knot in my stomach. Foam Latex day had arrived. The first thing I did was to go and check the fourth head armature I made last night.....as you can imagine, failure: the lower lip fell off as soon as I tried to move it around a bit. But it wasn't the end of the world...eyebrows, eyes, teeth, cheeks and chin, all seemed to be in place (I would realize later that they were not)
Anyway, upon my arriving to uni, I started setting all the armatures for their correspondent moulds. Glueing the nuts to the puppet's feet, and attaching the last copper tubes for the replacement hands and heads.

So, once I had applied the foam releasing agent (in perhaps an exaggerated way, I'll lower the dose next time) and brushed away all the powder remaining in the moulds, I was ready to start measuring grams , with a very funny looking gas mask, some protection goggles and latex gloves that were not made out of latex....(Health and Safety never has enough..)

Now , I am really sorry, but this next few lines will only be interesting for those of you who are animators (maybe just as the rest of the blog......?)


FOAM LATEX_ RUN 1                       

Room Temperature: 28* C           Room Humidity: 31%

Base Latex: 150gr   Foaming Agent: 30gr   Curing Agent: 15gr   Gelling Agent: 12gr

1. Increase from speed 1 to 12 during 30 sec.
2. Maintain speed 12 for 5 min
3. Reduce to speed 4 gradualy
4. Maintain speed 4 for 3 min
5. Add Gelling agent at speed 4 for 30 sec
6. Backbowl for 30 sec
7. Ultrarefine speed 1 for 2 min

NOTES:

I couldn't do the Backbowling (consequences of buying the cheapest stand mixer...)
I thought it was a bit slow to gel, as at the time of pouring the latex to the moulds, it was still to fluid.
Maybe there was not enough mix to begin with, the 195 initial grams barely made it up to the mixer's blades.
For next time, maybe increase the time in one minute for speed number 4, and make twice as much foam.


Once the foam was in the moulds, I let it gell for about 20 min, I then put them in the kiln at 85*C for two hours (I could say  they have been the two longest hours of my live...) . I had to find something to do during those two hours!! So I did, I approached a computer nearby, and started editing yesterday's animation of Orli's sculpture. So here is a quick look at the footage:

This is now becoming a really long post, and I still haven't shown you what happens when I open the kiln after those two hours, but as you know, I like to keep the tension of the audience. So tomorrow, as I have no money, instead of going out to grab a drink, I'll be blogging, uploading some more pictures, eating garlic pasta and watching some movie on BBC2 (did I just sound excited??)

Until tomorrow then!!                             

Animating Porcelain

YES!! Today has being a great day!! First, I got to animate Orli Ivanov's porcelain sculpture,  I had to interrupt the animation because I had a tutorial with one of my tutors, which made think a lot about my short film (I'll have to open a little discussion on the ending of the film in a future post). After the meeting, I continued with the animation. Quite a challenging one, as the "puppet" itself was made out of porcelain and the head was really heavy!. I will show the final result sometime this week!   

 

Once I animated this beautiful piece, I got on again with my project. I checked out the head armature I made yesterday (the second one I make) and it was also a failure!! Never the less, I learned a couple more things NOT to do. And so I came up with another head armature that I can only hope it works tomorrow, once it's dried. Apart from the head armature, I did two body armatures, and a couple of hands. Tomorrow morning I'll do the  final touches.

I know the head skeleton looks really ugly, but if everything goes right you won't have to see it again.
More and better for tomorrow!!!