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!