Stop Motion

Stop Motion 

Marius Urban 

The type of set i want to make is similar to this in scale and realism. My set is set in the forest so i am hoping to use natural materials to make it look believable... things like dirt stones and twigs.

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This is an example of the method i will use to create facial expressions on my character. it is basically a head with interchangeable face parts. the reason i wanted to do it this way is because you could be more accurate with facial expressions compared to the molding of putty mouth on the set that tend to look exactly like dough being pushed around in camera. The down side to this method is that i need to make many different variations of expressions before i start shooting which is going to take time.  

This is an example of the type of rig that my characters will be based on. simple double twisted wire. the only difference with my design is that the large metal plates on the feet, chest and hips will be made out of epoxy. I think that epoxy will hold it nicely and is a cheap alternative to getting the actual metal parts.

the original story

•Once there was a woodland Pixie

•Everyday he went fishing

•Until one day his fish was stolen

•This leads to a chase

•Catches the thief which is a mother of

something

•Empathises with the thief

•Helps the mother feed the young and builds

relationship with the creatures

the new story goes...

there once was a woodland pixie that went fishing in the river next to his house. 

He puts his catches into a basket. while the pixie has his back turned, a spider sneaks up and steals the catch out of the basket. The Pixie turns to catch the spider in the act. The spider gets away. 

the pixie is sad because he doesn't have the food he caught. the spider takes pity on him and gives him a net made out of webbing. They catch heaps of food thanks to the net and they are both happy. 

Design for pixie 

this is my design for the main character of the story. It is a tiny woodland pixie that lives in a hobbit style home in a forest by a small stream. I wanted to make him look fantasy based so i hope that explains the choices on his face, eyes and ears. His lack of clothes is due to the environment in which he lives and is a reflection of his freedom and semi primitive lifestyle. 

Design for spider

I found that the design for a jumping spider had a big eyed cute quality that i thought audiences could empathize with. as apposed to the long legged muscle spiders that i think most people hold phobias for.  

Renderings of characters

First Animation 

This my first test at using the cameras to produce a stop motion animation straight ahead style.

I learned a couple of things while doing this test. the first is that you really need to make sure that the Auto Colour function on the camera is turned off. the second thing is that you really need to take advantage of animating on 2's, I found that trying to animate at 24 frames a second made the animation rushed. for one movement each frame was either going to be too small a motion to see or you would move it too much making the animation too fast and the jumps become more apparent. Animating on ever second frame seems to be more consistent.  This test also secured the fact in my head that i did not want to work with this coloured clay. it was very crumbly after it sat for too long and the joints would break easily. it was also messy. 

Material list 

Aluminum wire for rigging characters

super sculpey grey medium blend
http://www.sculpey.com/product/super-sculpey-medium-blend-1-lb/

white clay


kneadable epoxy
https://www.mitre10.co.nz/shop/selleys-knead-it-epoxy-putty-110g-off-white/p/370325



liquid latex
.5 cm magnets like 12
tub of clear hair gel. (for water)
green fabric for green screen
static grass
burnt umber Brown spray paint


Knead It Epoxy Putty 110g Clear

https://www.mitre10.co.nz/shop/selleys-knead-it-epoxy-putty-110g-clear/p/167067

My Own Material exploration 

I have went and talked with a number of business people in town to get their opinions on where I can get materials from and what materials I could use. The Lady at the art store has been very helpful with coming up with set ideas and ways of getting textures for things like the spider and the eyes of the characters. She suggested this liquid mod podge that is used for making stickers have a 3d glassy surface to them. I liked this idea for the eyes of the spider because I thought that I could just drop some of this on the character model and have little rain drop type eyes. I found after experimentation though that the liquid is quite runny and takes a long time to dry. this makes the idea of putting the eyes directly onto the character model not as practical. I could potentially make the eyes separately and then glue the eyes to the character, this is something that i will test later when i start building the characters. The Art Store lady also gave me quite few packing boxes and a hunk of clay to start working out my ideas. 

with the hunk of clay i started to experiment with creating nature assets like tree stumps and floor tiles covered in moss. some worked out better than others. the main thing that I found is that you cant flatten out clay on a piece of card as the base, because when it dries it will bend. Also clay is very delicate and can crumble easily when making small things. 


I went to spotlight to try and find some fabrics that could work for my spider design. there were a couple of different fur fabrics that had the potential to be similar to the spider texture. but the fabrics were expensive for the smallest purchasable amount. A lady at spotlight gave me some contact details for a teddy bear maker who she suggested could give me some good ideas for fur texturing or potentially supplying me with some of their off cut fabrics.

I then went to the model shop in the small mall close to SIT. There I talked to a man about Static grass and model making. Although I think the results from the static grass are pretty incredible in realism, I don't think that it would suit the scale of my scene very well where the static grass would probably only be suitable for moss effects. but if i was going to make moss i would probably just find some moss to make it look more realistic at a cheaper cost.

Animatic 

I have finished my Animatic I feel overall mostly happy with how it turned out. I think the timings are pretty good, some of the framing could be a bit cramped and I am not 100% on the background song. I found some interesting things with the manipulations of sound effects, such as, The splash effect for the fish creature was not an individual sound effect that i found but in fact was just me turning up the volume of the stream sound effect quickly. This worked surprisingly well I thought. Also the sound effect for the Pixies blink was the front part of a water drop sound effect that I cropped. From some feed back that I got from some other students, in the final scenes where the spider gives the net to the Pixie it is not clear that the net is in fact some webbing that the spider made. I hope that in my stop motion piece that the texture of the fabric will be a good visual hint that it is webbing. or I could add in another scene of the spider making that net but I don't want to add another scene unless unless it is completely necessary I kind of want to have faith in the audiences intelligence and not beat them across the face with every single piece of information. I will still try out having the scene to see if it adds anything or whether it interrupts the flow.

Building

in building the character i first drew the character out on a piece of paper and then built the armature while comparing sizing's to the original drawing. this should help all my proportions of the character to stay consistent.

here is a concept sketch of the set I want. I hope to use natural stuff for my set like rocks and dirt and grass it should give the most realistic result for the least effort. for the water i hope to use hair gel as it it looks like water but can hold its shape enough for animation. the rest of the set should be ok to be carved out of polystyrene. 

here i am essentually blocking out my set with large pieces of polystyrene that i will further shape later. 

after trying to spray the polystyrene with spray paint i found that the

paint eats away the material. so here I covered the polystyrene in paper mache to provide a barrier to the paint and keep its shape.

this is my spider character in about a 30% finished stage. it has a wire armature a tinfoil filling and epoxy bones. the eyes are painted with black acrylic paint glossed with clear nail polish.

This is my test character i did so that i knew the process before i committed to my more risky big character. I found that the dragon skin substance that i was using was flexible which was good. but wires from the tips of the arms and legs would pock through and break the skin which was not so good. i will fix this by putting small epoxy balls on the tip of the wires to dull them. also the dragon skin can bubble, it is fine when it is below the surface, but when the bubbles for on the surface it leaves a big indentation. this could be fixed by doing the character in the steps of. 1) use the dragonskin to make a thin layer on either side of the mold and leave over night to dry. 2) pour more dragonskin on the top of these dry skins in the mold. 3) put the two sides of the mold together, bind and wait over night. this should stop the surface bubbling.

this is my model of the character. the armature is inside this character at this moment to make sure that it fits in the final mold.

it is sitting in a clay box with the clay bottom being situated half way up the side of the character. the bottom also holes poked part way through the floor, these will act as pegs to keep both halves aligned by slotting one into the other. this clay will be filled with plaster of paris a few centermeters above any point of the character to keep it strong. when this has dried, i remove the clay, flip the mold with half the character exposed, build clay walls around the mold. soap up the surface of the first mold to provide a slight separation to help pull both sides apart also put a piece of clay at the edge of the mold to act as a hole to provide a leverage hole to separate, and pore in more plaster of paris. the plaster dries quickly in about an hour and a half. now i have two halves to my mold. 

2 sides skinned

the skin idea would have work but i didnt put enough dragon skin in on the 2nd step. so both sides didnt stick together. I dont have enough time at this stage to wait two nights so i am going to re cast without the first step and hope for the best.

these faces i made out of a firm non hardening clay so i can edit them all over time without them going hard. they are all modeled off a base shape that i press them into to keep them consistent. after that i modeled the facial expressions. here they are lined up be cast in plaster of Paris so that i can press normal ground clay into them so that they will harden and i can paint them with acrylic paint.

here is the mold.

here is my spider. i got fur from an old teddy bear and pva glued shavings from its hair onto the surface. after the fur was consistently dense, i trimmed it down with some scissors and then painted it with acrylic paint.

the basket was made out of a weaved fabric that i papermached to a glad rap covered clay that gave the shape to the basket. when it had dried i slipped the basket off the clay and was left with a hard basket.

this is my work space for my animation. is is kind of tight to get around the back and the sides but it should work.