Main Project, Plan B, Week 1

 Re-making Set 1

I love textures and I think that is one thing I am not willing to compromise even in a tight deadline. 

Using my old puppet and borrowed tripod to figure out the size of the set for specific shots in the animatic. 

Cleaning up space after the previous short project. This is also to make sure I do not have any more big-spider surprises and goosebumps every time I try to find something in the studio mess. Spoiler, most things were just shifted to the other side of this room. 

I do not own the table, therefore few bin bags should protect it from damage. 

With big help from R. Scott, this basic cage fore the set was made. I had a go at putting a few screws in with a cordless drill and my hands were shaking, I need more practice with tools like this. By the way, the wood is from an old bed that was meant to go to Scrap, free wood. 

Getting really messy with the remake of my first set. You can tell I am running low on cardboard.

I love textures and so I used mod podge to put down some fabric on the cardboard 'wood' boards. 

I am really enjoying the freedom that I am building the set on the spot, I feel like me once again, no excessive overthinking and worry of moving the set around, just getting on with it.

Toilet rolls from Essential Waitrose range, perfect warm colour for the walls. 

PVA glue and water mixture for dipping the paper. 

Newspaper to capture excess water. 

I had to go to Wilko's one of the only shops open where I could get more PVA glue and some bandages for puppets. 

Wall now needs to dry, it is way more soaking than I expected and I had to put down the extra paper to absorb dripping liquid. I think some got underneath the cardboard floorboards too. I used a card from a cereal box to make the wall stones. 

Painting the floorboards with a mixture of acrylic paint, avoiding floorboards next to each other until I am sure that I have mixed enough paint.

That is a lot of floorboards. 

And that is the first layer done. 

Darker paint for the gaps. 

Painting the floorboards' gaps with dark brown, waterproof ink of a Pigma brush.

Making a lampshade.

Whilst making the floorboards, I have realised that the mod podge will help me keep the fabric in shape to make a lampshade. 

I used a cup protected with cling film to do this. After removing the cup, I trimmed the excess fabric. It turned out very well.

In the meantime, there has been a cat war between ours and the neighbour's cat. 

Figuring out how to make the new furniture since I am out of hot glue sticks and running very low on balsa wood (delivery times are quite bad right now and glue sticks that I could get from The Works for about a £1 for 100 pieces are more like £7-£10 on Amazon). In the meantime, the wall dried out nicely apart from a crack in the corner which I can hide easily. My guess is, it is because of the uneven base and excess moisture. 

Self Initiated Brief Part 2

Animated 'Thank You Baked Potato' song, Part 2

Here comes set improvisations, props, and animating.
Link to the animation

Car prop 

Painted with acrylic-gouache paint for matt finish

The sticks on the car prop in a box that is shuffled along with every frame.

Holding the puppet's hips and neck up with some fishing wire through the gaps in the table. 

Animating under the table to be able to use the fishing wire, I put the PC monitor down too. 

Animating on the floor was hard. My body does not seem to be built for it. But this seems to be common in stop-motion animation - physically demanding activity.

This is my version of the Baked Potato. It is from tin foil wrapped with fabric. Making attachment of limbs difficult. It is made from two pieces held together by a piece of masking tape at the back. Lip-sync was mainly achieved by adjusting the tension of the masking tape. As you can see, it is rigged by a toilet roll. I cut different lengths for different shots. 

Baked Potato washing hands. A set made from just about anything and everything I could find in the room. Biscuit tin acted as the bathroom mirror. It was a challenge to make it all hold together for the scene and there was very little space to get my hands in to animate without knocking into the tripod.

The door you see in the final video is a piece of paper I held in roughly the same distance from the camera in each frame.  

Here is another photo of the bathroom set setup. 

During this small project, this puppet and I really bonded

Same goes for the puppet and the Baked Potato

I may need a pair of actual glasses after lockdown is ower. 

In the meantime, here is a pair made from come paper, cling film and paint. 

The puppet is sunbathing indoors in a sun that it made and put up on the wall, well, thank you baked potato!

More props from toilet rolls. Have you noticed the old piece of carpet resting on some boxes as the base?

Really, it is difficult to reach the puppet through this jungle. 

Thanks to the raised platform, I made the potato jump into the scene. In real life, it does not really make sense but oh my does it look interesting!

The state of the room when I got a visit from a 'tarantula'.  Really, it gave me shivers.  It was so close to me on the floor when I noticed it, I do not think I will animate on a floor for a very long time.

I am animating the last scene about a day and a half later after making sure that the spider is nowhere to be found. 

Whops, one more scene with the grocery bag also done on the table and more toilet roll rigs.  

New off floor set up. 

So what went wrong apart from previously mentioned?

The light - some of the scenes were animated in the daylight and while animating under the table helped regulate it, it can be noticed in a number of scenes.

Again, the light - do not ask me why I did not think of this as a constant and rather got too excited using my colour changing bulb. Too late did I realise that the only way to make this look like one piece is to turn it into a black and white video. I do get asked a lot why is it B&W. Whops.

The sets worked out fairly well, really spending time building it right in front of the camera lens, avoiding any unnecessary detail, and focusing on the character animation.

The Boil of the dog puppet is so obvious. I will need to do some research to see what other people use to avoid it. Although in this film I sort of like it, it brings the puppet to life in some way. But in general, it is not desirable.

I am mostly happy with the lip-sync. It was hard to make it work with such a simple mouth. For some syllable, I opened both the top and bottom of the mouth, for some, just the top and for some just the bottom. Adding the neck movement where appropriate. Dragonframe sound import saved me from having to write a dope sheet as I could hear it frame by frame.

What else can be added? The film took me around 10 days to make starting in the second week of April. So about two weeks into lockdown. It has been a great comfort to be able to have my dog near me in a puppet form when I could not go and see her in person. This was also made during one of the toughest weeks of my time at university and I am confident to say of my life (so far). It did not seem like the right thing to do at the time when my final film needs producing. However, overwhelmed by the general unknown and insecurity and some personal problems escalating, for me this was the true light at the end of a tunnel. The project was short enough to be realistic and long enough to make things better. It is like a little tattoo from the pandemic situation that I will hopefully be proud to look at in the future. Oh, and yes, Matt Lucas did see it on Twitter!

Self Initiated Brief Part 1

Animating 'Thank You, Baked Potato' song, Part 1

I have been having some hard time with my personal life over the last few days and saw an opportunity to make a fun short animation to Matt Lucas' Thank You Baked Potato as I have already mentioned in my Professional Practice Blog. Here, I am explaining the actual process of making the video.

While it is a self-initiated project it is done to a chosen song that informs the structure of this film. Practically similar to the 11 Seconds Club, though it has got an ambitious length of 1 minute.

Rough of the idea for the story

One character is an Airedale Terrier dog

Fabric options

Making the puppet from wire and foam board.

Small paper bag made from a normal-sized bag with wire lining to make it posable.

Coffee stained faux fur fabric I had leftover

Coffee dried the faux fur into hard spikes, the vegetable brush was used to brush these out. I had to wear a face mask for this due to the small particles that got released in the process.

Testing the poses of the puppet

More posing

Another test

And another (testing the puppet dragging groceries bag into the house) 

Testing the coffee-stained faux fur

Adding the faux fur on the head using some hot glue

Fur for the ears

Stitching the fur in sections. 3 sections per leg. This allows full flexibility as the fabric is non-stretch.

There is no need for extra bulking out thanks to the fabric's volume and how it holds shape. 

Treating the puppet as if it was alive already. PAW!

Progress with stitching

Melted Polymorph, coloured in with acrylic-gouache (matt) paint and textured after softening in water. 

Two-piece head with separated tongue, to allow for the mouth movement

I look happy, have not run out of hot glue just yet, few sticks left at this point

The puppet is almost finished, Only missing the eyes and the signature back patch of an Airedale Terrier.

Tadaaaaaa, as an animator I like to get to know the puppet, it helps me create its expressions. So I took this puppet into the kitchen while I cooked my dinner.

It is a poser! 

While I made the dinner, I played with posing and taking pictures of the puppet.

Visually, the puppet is very appealing and has a character to it. I am very pleased, it is my first ever puppet of a dog other than 2D/3D claymation. It is expanding my experience as well as my portfolio. 

I did expect to work with a fluffy fabric to be harder but it was all good as long as I kept an eye on the direction in which the fabric layers, just like when hand stripping a wiry fur.

However, on the technical side, there is a number of flaws. Soon I have realized that the armature is not strong enough to hold the puppet. At this point, I have decided to continue simply because I wanted to experience dressing this puppet. 

The Jurasstic glue was not a good idea for this, though with the art shops shut and the delivery times unpredictable, it was my best option. I won't use it again for this application. The same goes for the foam, it is fairly brittle, though I did not have anything better to use.