Day one

I've started building my stop motion puppet.

First off, I went shopping:

Spiraling inwards and clockwise from the left: Scrap plastilina, some hardening clay for eyeballs and teeth, two tubes of plumber's epoxy, some fresh plastilina, a $5 pot for double-boiling clay, two spools of armature wire, wooden dowel and plank, nuts and bolts, modelling tools. It didn't even cost that much!

The first step in building a puppet is to build a wire armature. I started by drawing out a rough sketch of the figure. Then I cut 3 double-lengths of wire, one for the legs, one for the body, and one for the arms. I doubled-up the wire, and twisted it so that it will be more resistant to breaking. I then combined the three pieces together by bending and hot-gluing. One important step is to embed some nuts into the feet. These will be used to tie down the armature through the set floor once it's built. At this point, the armature looked like this:

It's _close_ to the drawing. . .

The next step is to add plumber's epoxy to areas of the armature that won't bend. Plumber's epoxy comes as a two-coloured stick. You break off a piece, knead it, and work like mad to mould it into whatever shape you need. You have to work quickly because it hardens in about 5 minutes. It also stinks, and "contains a chemical that is known to the State of California to cause cancer". I used gloves and sat by the window :) After applying the epoxy, the armature looks like this:

So there he is. Tomorrow I'm going to melt some scrap plastilina and bind it to the armature, and then I can start sculpting.

Day two

In order to make the clay stick to the armature, you are supposed to melt it in a double boiler. I tried this,

. . .but it never melted. It did get very soft, though, which may be the point after all. I should stop believing everything that I read on the internet. I layered the soft (and very hot!) clay onto the armature, then worked cold clay over top. This gave me something that looked like this:

A couple days later, I went back to finish it off. I learned a couple of things. First of all, my armature is a bit mis-proportioned. The arms are way too short, and the torso is too long. Second - scuplting is hard! But it is very fun. I would recommend to anyone that they should get a lump of plastacine to mess around with. Anyways, here's what I came up with:

Here's a closeup of the head:

And from the back:

Unfortunately, I manganged to detatch both of the foot tiedowns during the sculpting process. The puppet stands on its own, so I might just do some testing with it as is. I'll attach the foot-nuts more securly next time.

So now I'm just waiting for some camera cables that I ordered online to arrive, and I can make a test animation!

Day three

I've done a quick-n-dirty test with the puppet without the camera cables. This means that I wasn't able to do any onionskinning, and there is a bit of camera shake from me hitting the shutter button. First off, I built my stage. I used two pieces of bristol board- one taped to the wall, and the other just sitting on the desk. I lit the background board with one desk lamp, and the foreground with the other. The camera was placed on a tripod in front of the whole mess. The setup looked like this:

I set the camera to full manual mode and played with the settings to get a good exposure. If you don't set the camera to manual, it will find a new exposure with every frame, and the lighting may not look consistent. Here's one of the 54 frames that I shot:

Since this was just a test, I didn't have a script or any reference footage, so I just kind of moved the puppet around at random. Once I have the camera cables, I'll be able to use real-time previews to match movements acted out in live-action clips. This will help keep the timing consistent. I took a picture of my messy livingroom shelves to act as a background:

I took the jpgs off of the camera, and used irfanview to shrink them down and convert to bmps. Then I used virtualdub to stitch them together into a 12fps avi with no compression. I brought the avi and the background still into aftereffects to do the compositing. The matting is done using a linear colour key, a matte choker, and the spill suppressor. Spillage was a HUGE problem, since my model is white, and it caught a lot of secondary reflection off of the not-quite-matte bristol board. The supressor managed to clean it up nicely, though. There were a couple of frames where the armature poked out of the puppet's bent right elbow - I fixed them up with the clone stamp tool. You can download the AVI by clicking on the following still: