Ceri's Adventures in Stop-Motion

Woolly Logic T-Shirts

2011-01-18T20:08:00.000-08:00

Last week I did a couple of digital doodles in the style of printed circuit boards, posted them on facebook and it turned out that people liked them enough to want them printed on t-shirts. If you too want a PCB robot or skeleton emblazoned across your chest, then you can buy one in my Spreadshirt shop, Woolly Logic here:

http://woollylogic.spreadshirt.co.uk/

Walter Gloom

2010-12-15T16:05:00.000-08:00

Head over to the Walter Gloom blog or to my flickr album to see more photos my newest puppet, Walter Gloom. Puppet designed by James Geard.

Check out Edna!

2010-06-09T16:06:00.000-07:00

My new puppet:

Full details and more photos on the Watler Gloom blog:

http://waltergloom.blogspot.com/2010/06/unveiling-edna.html

Long Overdue News Update

2010-04-06T15:42:00.000-07:00

Again I have been absent from blogging for far too long - sorry about that. This is just a brief update of noteworthy things that have happened since my last post.

First up, the music video for Smile by The Leano was released in January and I went to the launch night in London which was a lot of fun and involved a variety of great live music.
If you haven't seen the video, here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBuRbw-lIqI

Loads of animators from around the world worked on it, including Don Carlson and Mike LeTendre. The singing spotty alien blobs section is mine. I think the whole thing was a fantastic project and I love the end result. All profits from the album sales are going to a charity helping displaced kids in Sri Lanka, so it's for a good cause too.

Most people reading this blog will have already seen the finished international stop-motion co-op film 'First Time Parents', but for anyone who hasn't:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRfb7TrpGak

I am so impressed by it! Even though people from all over the world worked on it without having ever meeting each other, the whole thing is very coherent. All the puppets and props that Emily Baxter and I made for it fit in perfectly with John Hankins' sets and props, and the whole film has a very friendly atmosphere to it. John's animation is amazing as always, and the music is brilliant.
I am rather in love with this animation and the woolly family it features. Emily's Mommy monster is quite obviously a soulmate for the Daddy puppet I made and I am very glad they found each other.

I am still working on making things for Walter Gloom and I intend to update that blog very soon with puppet building photos. Until then...

Things are happening at the Walter Gloom blog...

2009-10-22T12:20:00.000-07:00

Puppet building has started for Walter Gloom, and there are photos up on the Walter Gloom blog. Go on, have a look, you know you want to!

New studio!

2009-10-04T16:44:00.000-07:00

Sorry about my long absence from blogging folks - it has been due in part to the mammoth task of moving house. Daz and I have one Hell of a lot of stuff (mainly comics, books, DVDs and art equipment) which all had to be moved the 100 yards to the new house by hand, mainly by myself as Daz has been working down south for the last few months. I now have a new studio (yes, another spare bedroom) which is not only much bigger than my old studio, but also has the advantage that it doesn't double as Daz's junk room like my old studio did.

Here are a few photos of my new studio space:

'Monday to Friday' has been put on hold for the moment, and I have started work on the puppets for the Walter Gloom film that I am working on with writer/director James Geard. I will be posting images of the process I have used to make the puppet heads for the film over at the Walter Gloom blog in the next few days. Now I have to be off again, the heads need another coat of latex...

Two woolly monsters emigrate to Hawaii...

2009-07-13T16:43:00.000-07:00

Here are some photos of the two woolly monster puppets I made to send to John Hankins (castlegardener) as part of the international animation co-op. They are provisionally called 'Dad' and 'Toddler'. I'm afraid the lighting and focus in the photos is not great - I took them in a hurry under yellowish a light with no flash.

The Dad is a little smaller than my usual puppets, and is about 10 inches tall, the Toddler is tiny, just over 4 inches tall, and had to be made using miniature crochet with a 1mm hook.

Both puppets have aluminium armature wire and epoxy putty armatures which I wrapped with polyfibre wadding stuck in place with Copydex latex glue (one of the most versatile mediums in the world). The skins are made of hand crocheted yarn, acrylic and wool/acrylic blend in the case of the Dad puppet, and very fine angora/lambswool blend for the Toddler. The armature for the father had to be completed in stages after certain parts of the woolly skin had been sewn into place, otherwise the hands would have been too big to pass through the 'sleeves' of the skin.

The mouths are felt replacements, and other details are made using buttons and fluffy pom-poms. As usual I used french knitting (done on a circular four-pin bobbin) for Dad's fingers, which are threaded over latex and wool wrapped wire fingers.

The wonders of London

2009-05-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

I am temporarily back from London after a longer than planned stay, but I'm going back on Monday for a few more days. Daz's company is re-tiling a pool down there, so he's renting a very nice 3-bedroom flat for him and the other guys down in Kilburn, a few miles from the city centre, which I get to stay in for free - woohoo! Usually I can only afford to stay in the cheapest 'hotel' in London, a very grim place in Earls Court which became the inspiration for my 'Grey Heights Guesthouse' animation. It's unlikely that I'll be able to afford to spend so much time in London again, so I'm making the most of it whilst I can.

I travelled out to Woking on Thursday to meet up with director James Geard and talk about our collaboration, Walter Gloom. He had some fantastic sketches and ideas and has put together a great storyboard for me to work from. To see some of his drawings and follow his pre-production work, check out the Walter Gloom blog.

The rest of this post is mainly going to be me enthusing about London, no stop motion I'm afraid...

I love living in the North-West, but I have to admit that every time I go down to London I fall in love with the place a little more. I have no interest in the nightlife or shopping - I avoid both of these things like the plague, unless it's shopping for books or comics of course! The main things I love about London are the excellent art galleries and museums, the architecture and the public transport system (yup, I'm a real geek). London now comes a very close second to Vienna, Austria which is my favourite city in the world (for very similar reasons).

Visiting the British Museum is my version of a religious pilgrimage. My entire purpose in life is Art, and the British Museum is a cathedral to the entire history of human cultural expression throughout the world (the V&A is similar, only with more emphasis on the history of design rather than history in general, and mainly focusing on the last 1000 years or so). I spent two full days in the British Museum, and now I have finally, after 5 visits in 3 years, managed to see everything in the permanent displays (yes it really is that big).

My favourite bits of the British Museum are Mexico, the Asia section (China, India, Japan etc.), Africa and the Lewis Chessmen. I'm also a sucker for anything featuring ancient methods of writing. I could quite happily pitch a tent in the central court of the British Museum and live there permanently!

As for the V&A, my favourite bits are the Islamic Middle East and South Asia, among many others.
The other great thing about both museums is the amazing bookshops.

And then of course there is also the National Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, The Wellcome Collection, The Saatchi Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery, The Natural History Museum, The Science Museum, and many many other galleries and museums to be inspired by.

Along with my passion for looking at pretty much anything that's in a glass case, on a plinth or hanging on wall with a little information tag beside it, I also love the London Underground. There are several reasons for this. The tube map is a work of design genius and all those interconnected coloured lines and dots fuel my autistic side (I like trying to work out the most efficient route between two stations by time, distance, number of connections and which route is most aesthetically pleasing on the map... ). I also like the efficiency and convenience of it all (anyone reading this in London is shaking their head now). Even with the staff strikes, signal failures, people jumping under trains and security alerts, it is still much quicker and easier to get around than in the Bolton/Salford/Manchester area, where nothing interconnects properly, you have to wait ages between each bus/train and everything is run by different companies that require separate day tickets so it ends up costing a fortune.

Despite the wonders of London, there is no way I could survive living there. Apart from the fact that even renting a tiny bedsit costs more than twice as much as renting a good sized two bedroom house in Bolton, I'd probably die of over-stimulation (if such a thing is possible). London has the same effect on me as large quantities of sugar and brightly coloured cartoons have on small children (or the effect that the London Forbidden Planet megastore and Orbital Comics shop have on Daz). Most importantly though, the tap-water down there is horrible lime-scaley stuff that forms a skin on top of your tea and makes it taste funny, and I could never live in a city where you can't make a good cup of tea...

Anyway, enough of my London related ramblings, by next weekend I should have two new woolly monster puppets to post about. Whilst in London I've also been doing some drawings for a little comic/artist-book type thing I want to put together and print a short run of, but I'll post more about that if and when I eventually finish it, so I can try to sell you all a copy!

More random props...

2009-05-18T16:47:00.000-07:00

Just some more assorted props I've made for the international stop-motion co-op project. The measurements on the set-square are in inches.

Here is some tiny crocheted stuff. The blanket, pillow and cushion were made with a 1mm hook, the doily in the second photo was made with a 0.6mm hook. They took nearly as long to make as they would have done if they were full size because they contain almost the same number of stitches!

Here are a couple of rather contemporary looking stools I made. The seat cushions are hand crocheted and the bases are just frosted glass jars turned upside down:

Here is a tea-set. It's a bit too small for the scale of the rest of the set, so maybe it's an espresso set. I just used a 'Disney fairies' doll's china tea-set from the pound-shop, peeled off the fairy stickers and drew flowers on with Sharpie markers. I sealed the surface using an acrylic based varnish:

I also made a bowl of 'monster fruits' using a little glass sauce-dish and an assortment of glass and wooden beads with green neoprene stalks:

I'm off to London on Wednesday for 6 days, for a marathon of museum and art gallery visiting, and also to meet up with James Geard, director of 'Walter Gloom', to talk about film stuff.

I won't have any internet access, so I apologise in advance for not replying to any emails for a while.

Masquerade

2009-04-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

Ok, so this isn't in any way stop-motion related, but it is linked to costume-making of the full-scale variety.... sort of.

On Saturday night Daz and I went to a 'Masquerade Ball' for our friend Caroline's 20th birthday party at the Dog and Partridge, our favourite pub and the main hangout for Bolton's alternative musicians and arty types. It was a thoroughly fun night, with great live bands and a DJ outdoors. It was all a bit surreal, seeing the usually scruffy clientelle dressed up in suits, ball gowns and elaborate masks, and far too much alcohol was consumed by all (although that's nothing unusual on a Saturday night in Bolton).

Anyway, I got a bit carried away making my mask over the last few weeks. Whereas most people are happy with sequins and feathers, I decided I wanted to be a robot with working LEDs and circuits...

I put together one shop-bought blank moulded mask, the lenses from my old pair of prescription glasses, some epoxy putty, lots of PVA glue, acrylic based metallic model paints (Games Workshop), one 9V battery, two ultra-bright blue LEDs, red and black 7 strand equipment wire, one and a half packs of 5 minute epoxy resin, a few metres of silver plated copper jewellery wire, blue glass beads, aluminium wire, heat shrink tubing, lead free solder, brass rings, some small springs, a selection of sizes and types of copper, brass and stainless washers, assorted types of resistor, some solenoids taken from the inside of an old Xbox 360 console, nuts, bolts, heavy duty elastic, copydex, cushion foam, grey satin ribbon and some other bits and bobs, and made this:

It has prescription lenses so that, in theory, I'd be able to see (they actually kept fogging up, and the peripheral vision was terrible). I even wore some very geeky earrings that I made out of electronics components a while ago, to complete the look.

This is me and Daz (my fiance and muse - the original inspiration for all the woolly monsters) at the party. As you can see, looking smart is not in our nature - I personally think that wearing a military trenchcoat over a ball gown is a good look! Daz made his mask with prescription lenses too, and a spiral of tiny brass watch cogs round one eye and some swirly black iridescent fibres on the other side. Apparently it was inspired by the nature of time and entropy... I think. Here's photo of Daz looking like a very camp evil hypnotist, which gives a better view of his mask.

This photo was taken pretty late, when we were all pretty sloshed. I'm on the far left, with Daz clinging to me (probably for stability). Caz, the birthday girl and Wolve (her partner and one of our closest friends) are at the back in the middle, stood on the stage:

So, ummmm, yeah, sorry, not in any way stop-motion related...

Props, cheap LEDs and fuzzy boobs!

2009-04-12T01:25:00.000-07:00

I just thought I'd post some photos of various props I've made over the last few weeks. Most of them are for the international animation co-operative set up by John Hankins (castlegardener).

The first few are some wooden toys made from wooden bits and bobs I had in my hoard of useful junk:

And this is my idea of what a Bubo (Clash of the Titans) bean-bag toy would look like. He's made of painted polymer clay:

And here's another silly stop-motion reference. Two plates with sheep on (ok, so I didn't 'make' them, I just drew on two plain doll's plates with Sharpie markers, then varnished them):

The other things I've been working on are some working table-lamps. I got an bargain on some ultra-bright LEDs in a variety of colours from a website called http://www.phenoptix.co.uk/ who even sell blue and white LEDs for less than 14p each! That's ridiculously cheap, especially for those colours... I remember back when I was doing AS-level electronics in the late 90s, blue LEDs cost about £3 each and white LEDs hadn't even been invented... ahhhh, so long ago...

The website also sells great value resistors, which you need to prevent the LEDs being destroyed by the 9V circuits I wire them into. Great service too - if you need LEDs, I highly recommend them (they ship internationally too). The LEDs are really powerful (especially the white ones) and give a narrow 20 degree beam of light. They are so bright that I think I could probably use them as small spot-lights for lighting areas of my sets, which is great because they run for ages on a 9V circuit, they come in loads of colours, they don't flicker and they don't heat up!

Anyway, I used yellow LEDs in these two table lamps, to be placed in a sunny yellow coloured set. The lamps are made from glass beads and hollow wooden bases all glued together with epoxy. I soldered a 3mm yellow LED with a resistor into a circuit with a PP3 clip for a 9V battery, then covered all the exposed wires with heat-shrink tubing, with more heat-shrink over the top of that to turn the two seperate wires into one cable going from the lamp (the batteries will be hidden, obviously). I glued the LED into the bottom of the hole through the centre of the lamp, and put a 'plug' of tin foil fixed with epoxy into the hole at the top of the lamp to act as a reflector bouncing light back into the lamp.

I also made this lamp, to go in a set with a blue colour scheme, using a 3mm white LED. Most white LEDs give off a blue tinged light, and this one looks extra blue because of the blue glass in the lamp. It gives out about 3 times as much light as the yellow lamps, so I hope it won't be too overpowering!

Oh, and one last completely unrelated picture:

Yup, that's what woolly alien glamour model looks like, just in case you ever wondered...

It's for the cover of a magazine prop in 'Monday to Friday'.

If it arouses you (and you aren't a woolly alien yourself) you should probably be concerned!

My other project - Walter Gloom

2009-03-21T11:48:00.000-07:00

I've just started a new shared blog with writer/director/art director James Geard, which will document the production of a short film we are working on together - working title 'Walter Gloom'. At the moment James is working on the storyboards and designs, and I'll be starting work on the final sets and puppets in June when I've finished 'Monday to Friday'.

The blog is here: http://waltergloom.blogspot.com/

This project is completely different to my usual animations, and will give me a great opportunity to work with human puppets and also give me the experience of making someone elses ideas and designs come to life. To give you a taster, here is one of James' original character designs for Walter, the main character in the film:

And here is a photo of a prototype head I made for the puppet, to experiment with building up an old wrinkly face using liquid latex over a Fimo polymer clay head. I am currently experimenting with making replacement mouths and eyebrows for the puppet using Sculpey Bake & Bend clay, but to see more about that and more designs you'll have to follow the Walter Gloom blog!

Daz and I have just come back from London where I met up with James to discuss the film. We also visited as many museums and galleries as was humanly possible in the time we had, so we are now feeling exhausted but very content. I think if I lived closer to London I'd spend practically every day in the British Museum....

Unfortunately we ran out of time before we got to the Natural History Museum, so next time we go down I've promised Daz that the dinosaurs will take priority!

Finally, some alien industral set photos!

2009-03-16T19:31:00.000-07:00

At last, here they are, some photos of my woolly monsters in their finished alien technology set, ready to animate! The photos were taken using my new FZ50 and you can click on them to see the BIG versions on flickr:

It's probably best not to ask what the heck is going on in the last photo!

A year of stop-motion and a new camera to celebrate!

2009-03-07T07:07:00.000-08:00

I have been adventuring in the art form that is stop-motion animation for about a year now, so I've just treated myself to a factory refurbished Panasonic Lumix FZ50! Oooooh, shiny....
I can't shoot any animation with it at the moment because I'm waiting for an AV capture card for my laptop to turn up, but I am going to use it to take some photos of my industrial set and puppets later on. I'm also waiting for a full set of lens filters to turn up for it, so I can have some fun experimenting with those.

Twelve months ago, I'd been obsessively researching stop-motion 12 hours a day for a couple of weeks. I'd signed up to SMA, I'd ordered a webcam, but I hadn't yet pushed a puppet (that happened for the first time on the 17th March).

Anyway, I don't think it is an understatement to say that stop-motion has changed my life (sounds rather melodramatic, but it's true).
If you'd have told me 2 years ago that in 2009 I'd be alive, happy and relatively stable, I would never have believed you. I wouldn't have been able to even imagine that I could make a stop-motion animation. The idea of me actually thinking about a 'career' of any kind would have been laughable.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say, in a long-winded and inept way is thankyou to everyone who has encouraged me, given me advice and helped me build my confidence over the last year:

Everyone on SMA and everyone who has commented on my blog or my youtube channel - thankyou so much. Seriously, without all of you I'd have never even got started, let alone had the confidence and motivation to keep on animating.

Thanks to my partner Daz and my parents who have encouraged me and supported me completely during my stop-motion adventure.

Thanks also to Dr. Pradip Patel for teaching me that the only way I was going to learn to cope with the world was to accept my difficulties and focus on my strengths, and also for telling me that my brain isn't broken, it's unique.

When I started this adventure, I set myself a target of being able to produce professional standard stop-motion animation within a year. I never expected to reach the target, it was just something to aim for and keep me focused. 'Professional' does cover a wide spectrum, and I still have many years of work before I reach the standards of Nick Hilligoss and Ron Cole, but if we define 'professional' as whether people are willing to pay me to animate, then I have succeeded in my mission!

Thanks again everyone :)

EDIT: Thankyou also to my late grandmother Edna who left me the money with which I bought my new camera. She never got to see any of my animations, but I think she would approve. Thanks Grandma!

Treasure!

2009-02-18T23:35:00.000-08:00

I have recently accumulated some interesting bits of 'treasure' (please note that my idea of treasure differs greatly from most people's).

First up - things I have been given. Daz, my main contributor of unusual junk has excelled himself recently. My favourite objects are the transparent electronic switch thingies (at least I think that's what they are - they came from an old 'plant room control board' apparently...) at the top left - perfect for monster technology! He has also brought home some little lightbulbs, the insides of an Xbox 360 (not pictured) and some kind of dial and switch arrangement (from the same plant room I think). I can't imagine many women get so excited by being given salvaged building site junk!

I also just rediscovered a jug full of crystal dangly things (removed from a hideous lamp) which my Mum kindly brought me from my late grandparents' house a few months ago, along with some vintage buttons.

I have also had a number of great pound shop finds recently. I'd been looking for something that I could turn into speakers for the alarm system in my technological set for ages, when I came across some fridge magnets with a black wire mesh front. I think the square ones or the round ones will work great with the stylized retro-industrial feel of the set.

I also managed to pick up a huge haul of iridescent semi-transparent glass beads from the pound shop, which I'm sure will come in useful for something. The necklaces are about 4ft long, so that's a heck of a lot of beads! There are so many that I can't get the lid onto the big plastic tub I put them in.

I also made another trip to Fairfield Yarns and got some wool/angora blend 2ply yarn for miniature crocheting in lilac, a burgundy purple colour and dark turquoise. I also got some lovely speckled pure wool DK yarn in blue and dark navy.

Getting the new yarns allowed me to finish off my mini-blanket too. I think I will give it to the samurai puppet that John Hankins made me when I finally get round to doing the animation with it that I've been planning for ages.

Coming soon: The long delayed photos of my completed alien technology set and lots and lots of house-plant props...

Phyllis Pamplemousse

2009-02-15T16:13:00.000-08:00

I can now reveal my most recent woolly monster toy, as it is now safely with its new owner Helen Gibbons (aka Shine). Helen is a incredibly talented fibre-artist and was a fellow 'intellectual rebel' when we were at high school together ('intellectual rebel' sounds better than trying to explain the chaos that was TEKAYL... eh Helen!). I made her a monster in exchange for a fantastic pair of hand-knitted socks she made for me, which are currently keeping my feet toasty warm.

Her special monster requests were:

Fierceness

Colours you can see from space

Lots of legs/tentacles

Lots of eyes

The result is the very toothy, seven-legged monster, Phyllis Pamplemousse:

Phyllis is pretty big (I forgot to measure her before I put her in the post, but I'd guess she's about 14" diameter) and her main body is made of crimson acrylic doubleknit yarn crocheted together with bright scarlet mohair to make a thick fuzzy fabric. The rest of her is made of acrylic doubleknit in dark purple, light violet, a golden yellow colour and black. The eye buttons are just a selection of buttons I already had in my button boxes, but finding the perfect buttons for teeth was a bigger challenge!

I knew I needed some big toothy looking toggles for optimum fierceness and set about trying to find some of those shark-tooth shaped toggles that you used to find on duffle coats, only to find that they must be the most out of fashion buttons in the world. After trips to Bury, Chorley and Bolton markets, numerous habedashery shops and lots of internet button suppliers, I could only find some ugly dark grey ones - not toothy at all. In the end, ebay came to my rescue and I found some flat bottomed white toggles that were even more perfect for Phyllis than the shark-tooth ones I had originally imagined!

Here is Phyllis' story:

Smaller and smaller....

2009-01-26T05:40:00.000-08:00

Well I've managed it! I can now crochet with a 0.6mm hook (usually used for fine lace-making) and single thread wool yarn (more commonly used for weaving cloth). It's mainly my poor eyesight that makes it tricky, the actual action of crocheting is exactly the same as on a normal scale.

I made a tiny woolly bobble hat! It is about 19mm in diameter (60mm circumference) and 15mm tall (not including bobble). I used double crochet stitch (that's single crochet if you're American) for most of it and treble crochet (double crochet if you are American) to give it a ridged edging. It is 38 stitches around at the widest point. The tip of my (slightly scarred) index finger is in the photos for scale.

Here it is actual size (assuming you are viewing this the same size as I am).

I've worked out that if it is supposed to be an adult sized hat then it is between 1:10 and 1:9 scale. To be honest I think this is as small as I can go - once the stitches get smaller than 1mm square, my eyes can't cope anymore!

Yarn heaven and mini crocheting...

2009-01-25T14:37:00.000-08:00

Inspired by Emmyymme's recent miniature knitting exploits (plus the fact that I just treated myself to a full range of 21 crochet hooks ranging from 0.6mm -10mm), I decided to have a go at some miniature crochet. The first thing I made was a mini blanket. I used 2ply woollen yarn and a 1mm crochet hook.

So far it is about 13 cm square (about 5 inches) and I am going to finish it off by edging it in another shade of blue. I'm also going to make a mini 'granny square' patchwork blanket as soon as I get some more 2ply wool in different colours.

Next, I decided to make a miniature crochet monster:

She is 9cm / 3.5 inches tall (not including tufty bits) and her name is Delilah Axolotl (on account of her tufty 'gills' and the fact that axolotls are my new favourite creature after seeing one on QI last night). My usual woolly monster puppets are about 10-14 inches tall, so Delilah is small enough to be a doll for one of them.

I have not tried crocheting with single ply yarn and a 0.6mm hook yet. To be honest I'm not sure whether it's really necessary to go that small for my purposes - I'm never likely to work at 1:12 scale or smaller!

I have also discovered possibly the most amazing discount yarn supplier in the world. For anyone who likes doing any kind of needlecraft or textile work and can feasibly travel to Heywood (near Bury/Bolton in Lancashire, northwest England) - it is essential that you visit this place!
The shop is only open to the public on Fridays 10am - 5pm (other times by arrangement).

http://www.fairfieldyarns.co.uk/

They have an old Co-operative store which has two rooms literally full, from floor to ceiling, of thousands and thousands of part-cones and balls of surplus yarn in every variety imaginable. Wool, cotton, linen, silk, synthetic, metallic, mohair, cashmere, alpaca all in every thickness and colour you could imagine. I'd estimate that most of the cones have 200g-1kg of yarn left on them, and you pay for them by weight. At least half of the yarns are priced as low as 99p/100g!
They have even supplied Cosgrove Hall with yarn for mini-knitting of puppet costumes.

I bought a ball of black and a ball of white acrylic doubleknit (always handy), a cone of turquoise mohair (great for fuzzy monsters), a huge cone of burgundy pure wool doubleknit (or four-ply, it's hard to tell) and some periwinkle blue 2ply and single ply green wool for mini crocheting. The can of 7up is there for scale. I am going back again next Friday to get more colours!

Bleurgh...

2008-12-19T18:27:00.000-08:00

I do not operate well in winter, hence my general lack of activity here recently. I should be working on 'Monday to Friday' but due to the season sapping every ounce of my motivation and energy... I'm not. I have mainly been crocheting woolly hats for baby Mya (my fiance Daz's niece) for the fast approaching Christmas-type celebrations, and sleeping.

I am longing for spring and the usual period of manic excitement and hyperactivity it usually brings me, then I'll probably finish 'Monday to Friday' at lightening speed. In fact it was during my spring euphoria last year that I spontaneously decided that I was going to make stop-motion animations (despite knowing nothing about the process) which remarkably seems to have been one of my more successful ideas (much more successful than the farming invisible llamas and building multi-coloured yurts 'inspired idea' of 2006 anyway). Funny how things work out...

Anyway, my applications for funding were turned down, not that I'm surprised. I put in the applications mainly for the experience of putting together a film proposal, knowing that I'd be up against lots of much more experienced animators.

Oh, and the big commission I mentioned in the previous post fell through, but the maketing agency have said they will consider me for future jobs. Still, it is very encouraging to know that a genuine London marketing agency (with clients like MTV) has even seen my work, let alone liked it enough to contact me!

So, er, yeah... rest of winter will be spent working v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y on 'Monday to Friday'.
When that is finished, I have plans to make 'Loose Yarn', the film I applied for the funding for. I will have to make it on a much smaller budget than I would have done with the funding, but it will still be the most ambitious (and expensive!) thing I have ever attempted.

Oh well, roll on spring...

Exciting times....

2008-11-11T15:03:00.000-08:00

There hasn't been much time for blog updating over the last few weeks... very very busy.

For a start I've been working on a short film proposal for funding from the 4mations scheme (run by channel 4). Being my usual self, I got a bit carried away trying to get it perfect so I ended up not sleeping a great deal over the last few weeks. Anyway, now it's just a case of wait and see.

On top of that, I may (fingers crossed) have a big commission (about 2 months worth of animating) but I can't really say much more about that at the moment...
'Monday to Friday' (the short I've been working on with the monsters in the factory) may have to be put on hold for quite a while!

These truly are exciting times for me!

Also, if anyone is interested, I have a temporary website up (until I have the time to build a proper one), but it does have a gallery full of my woolly monster artist-toys:

www.ceriwatling.co.uk

You can also see a selection of my woolly creations on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/30223082@N04/sets/72157608794258117/

I'm in the HAFFTube final 50!

2008-10-22T14:54:00.000-07:00

HAFFTube is a web based competition being held as part of the Holland Animation Film Festival, where animators had to submit their youtube short films to be voted out by the public. I entered three, and now voting has ended and 'Grey Heights Guesthouse' is in the final top 50 (and is the shortest film in the running)! Woohoo!
You can see it by going to the first page of 'Favourites' on the HAFFTube site.

Now the 50 remaining animations will be judged by a panel made up of filmmakers selected for the main film festival. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Bacup Film Festival

2008-10-19T21:14:00.000-07:00

Two of my 10 second long animations (the Teleporter one and the Grim Guesthouse one) are going to be shown at the Bacup Film Festival, one on the 24th and the other on the 25th of October. That means free film festival tickets for me and Daz! Thanks Steeeeeee!

In the unlikely event that anyone reading this blog is going to be in the Rossendale area of East Lancashire next weekend, come along to the Horse and Bamboo Theatre in Waterfoot on either night and see my 10 seconds of glory (and stay to watch lots of other interesting films of course).

The theatre it is being held at sounds really interesting, and has a big emphasis on puppetry and masks. I had never even heard of it before, but apparently it is quite famous.

Alien Technology - constructing my new set

2008-10-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

My industrial looking alien set is almost finished - just a few details to add, a few wires to tidy up, then glue everything down and it's done. I'll be posting some good photos of the finished set very soon. Until then, here are some photos of how it was made and how it looks so far. Sorry about the horrid shiny flash lighting in the photos, I will light the photos of the finished set properly, I promise!

The set is the workplace of the two monsters I posted a photo of a while back. I've indulged a lot of my obsessions with this set - electronics, 'alien' alphabets, technological looking stuff...
My main inspirations for the design of the set are the spaceship interiors you see in science fiction (Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey etc.). I've always loved the fact that there are so many important looking buttons and dials and lights and screens, yet none of them actually do anything - they are just designed to look important by the set designer.
The other visual influence on this project was 1950/60s machinery - the huge broken machines you find abandoned outside college metalwork departments, the disconnected 'mystery' boxes you find on the walls of school basements that once controlled heating systems that were removed decades ago... I think I just like machines which serve no purpose. Anyway, I've built one of my own.

Here is a photo of some, but not all, of the things I used to build this set (one or two things that I didn't use managed to sneak into this photo too).

The materials I used included: a sheet of MDF, a sheet of foamboard, woodscrews, lots of metal washers of assorted sizes, upholstery nails, flat wooden shapes with holes drilled round the edges (from the Arnold Basketry Kit!), those plastic cap things for covering the heads of screws in silver and white, brass rings, brass panel pins, brass picture turns, paper-mache craft boxes, old bits of meccano, different coloured electricians tape, lots of PVA glue, acrylic paint, sandpaper, some tubes from a duplo set (like big lego), nyloc nuts, a fine point Sharpie marker, LEDs (light emitting diodes) of different sizes and colours, lots of resistors of different values, heatshrink tubing, insulated wire, lead free solder, aluminium wire and probably quite a few things I've forgotten.....

So, er, yeah, lots of random stuff. Most of the fixings are available from any good hardware store and the electronics components I ordered from Maplin.

This shows some of the bits and bobs arranged on the piece of MDF that will become the back wall of the set so I could get an idea of how things should look. I then glued down all the bits I wanted to be painted with the background colour, using PVA glue. I used upholstery nails to look like rivets, wooden shapes too look like metal panels and metal washers to add detail. I also drilled a line of holes across the board where a row of LEDs will be.

Once the glued was dry, I painted over the entire background with a specially mixed 'steel' colour. I mixed two small pots of Games Workshop 'Boltgun Metal' paint with a large amount of cheap white craft acrylic paint and a little black and blue acrylic. This made the paint slightly metallic looking. I applied it using a sponge to avoid brushmarks.

The strip at the top is made using black and red electricians tape over the row of holes for the LED. I added details using washers and some plastic tile-spacers that I had already painted black. Everything was coated in a layer of PVA glue to protect it and make it shiny like metal (as opposed to the matte wood it is actually made of).

This is the floor of my set. I made it by sticking rectangular panels of sandpaper in a grid pattern with small gaps between them, onto a large piece of wood using PVA glue. I then painted the sandpaper with a mixture of PVA and grey acrylic. I used a darker grey acrylic to paint the 'grout' between the tiles, then before it dried I smudged it about with a sponge. I then used a large piece of bubble-wrap to print a spotty texture onto the tiles, first light grey paint, then dark grey - hopefully this texture will help to disguise tie-down holes. I then went over the grout again with a fine brush and a very dark grey paint.

If you look to the left of the photo there is a little black box with wires coming out of it and LEDs on the front. I used lots and lots of these in this project. They are made from those tiny brown paper-mache gift boxes you can buy in craft stores. I painted boxes and lids with acrylic paint then PVA to strengthen them. Then I poked little holes in the boxes with a pin so I could push the 'legs' of LEDs through. I also sometimes pushed resistors through to decorate the boxes. Then I wired up the LEDs.

This is what is inside the little boxes - messy but functional. I think made 12 of them in all. Some of the LEDs on the other side are not wired up - I cut the 'legs' of these LEDs and cover them in hot glue to hold them in place and insulate them (don't want to short out my circuits!). Then I solder the LEDs together in series with a resistor (the value of the resistor depends on the type and number of LEDs) being very careful not to burn a hole in the cardboard with the soldering iron. The wires are all colour coded so I know which terminal of the battery they need to go to. I will be running the LEDs in the set on three seperate 9V circuits.

Obvious Warning: if you are going to mess with electronics never use mains electricity, you'll end up killing yourself and/or burning your house down, and don't leave your creation switched on unattended in case it catches fire!

This is the front and back of the (almost) finished back panel of the set. Lots of LEDs, lots of buttons and lots and lots of wires... good job I quite enjoy soldering!

This is a front and back view of my console. It was made from a Christmas gift box and some upholstery nails. The buttons are all plastic screw-covers (with the backs snipped off) with symbols drawn on them with a fine marker, then covered in a thin layer of PVA to stop it rubbing off.
The 'big red button' is a safety nose for stuffed-toys!

This is roughly how it will all fit together - at the moment things are still propped up instead of glued in place and there are still loose wires and a few details missing, but you get the idea.

There will be photos of the finished set next time, along with close-ups of some of the details and descriptions of how I made them.

Until next time, have fun. Oh, and if you haven't already seen it, watch Michel Gondry's 'The Science of Sleep' - cardboard stop-motion cities, celophane water, tin-foil time machines and huge hands - brilliant film in my opinion.

Castlegardener's Poetree and other updates

2008-09-15T06:56:00.001-07:00

Back again after another week of not being able to do much due to back pain...grrrrr. It means that the short I'm working on wasn't finished for the Bristol short film festival deadline and probably won't be finished for the Bacup film festival. Oh well, shit happens.
The short I'm working on is going to be the first of five episodes of a series, so I might pitch it as a pilot to 4mations and see if I can get some money to make the other four episodes. It's worth a try anyway!

Anyway, onto the most important news: A couple of weeks ago Castlegardener (aka John Hankins) finished working on a fantastic animation called 'Poe-Tree'. If you haven't already seen it, go and watch it now on his youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIqoCLQZQIk
It's John's first lip-sync animation and I love it! The woolly ent puppet is one of my creations and I sent it to John in Hawaii along with lots of replacement mouths, so I think he felt obliged to do some lip-sync with it. The voice for the ent is Oregon based animator Don Carlson (Pram Maven).
What more could you want in an animation - a very dramatic poetry-reading tree, Edgar Allan Poe, a brilliant raven puppet and John's incredibly expressive animation!

My woolly creations have also been popping up in other far-flung places recently... check out the bouncing finger puppets on Canadian animator Emmyymme's (Emily Baxter's) blog: http://emmyymme.blogspot.com/2008/08/manfrotto.html
and Shelley Noble, who is working on her film 'Halfland' in California, has received the 'woolly glove fish' (or Doug to his friends) and the shoal of 'alphabafish' I made for her. There are a couple of test shots of them at the end of this post on her blog:
http://notesfromhalfland.blogspot.com/2008/08/aint-no-mountain-high-enough-and.html

The monsters are taking over!

Next post: how to make a high-tech industrial alien looking set out of MDF, cardbord, junk, electronic components and stuff from the hardware store....

Why you should never leave alcoholic beverages in your animation studio....

2008-08-20T07:33:00.000-07:00

Last month I planned to make an animation for the 'soundbite challenge' on http://www.stopmotionanimation.com/ (the online hub of all things stop-motion) where the aim was to make an animation to fit a 30 second piece of rock music. Unfortunately due to a whole host of events conspiring against me, I never got round to it. I did manage to set the puppets up for the shoot a few weeks ago, I just didn't have time to animate them. The intention was to animate all the monster puppets from my previous animations getting drunk and partying together.

Well, today I am putting all the puppets away and dismantling the set to build new one, so I thought I'd take a few photos of the drunken troublemakers before their booze was taken away and they were put way in a box for the forseeable future:

I apologise for the rudeness of that woolly purple monster - I assure you I had nothing to do with it!

The bottom photo is the box that the hungover monsters will call home for the next few months. I feel rather bad really, taking them out of their natural habitat whilst they were intoxicated and shutting them in a box without any asprin.

To anyone who is worrying about the quantity of hideous coloured liqueurs we own, please note that we may own them, but we don't actually drink them! All these bottles are all almost full, old and dusty (some are well past the 'best before' date) and were given to us over the years, probably by people who were desperate to get rid of them. People also keep buying Jack Daniels as gifts for Daz, despite the fact he hates the stuff... he just must look like a Jack Daniels drinker.

Now on with building my new set...

New woolly monster puppets

2008-08-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

Woohoo! I'm back in action after a week incapacitated by back pain. I managed to put my back out whilst I was asleep (no, I don't understand it either) and spent days unable to do anything but sit upright and perfectly still or lie flat and perfectly still - really useful. Thankfully I am now feeling much better although still a little delicate. It's slowed down my schedule a lot though, which is a shame.

Here are the two puppets for my next animation. Unfortunately Steeee isn't going to be able to write a script for me due to being a very busy man (no seriously, I don't know when he finds time to sleep). I have come up with an ingenious idea for the script (or lack thereof) myself. It will all become apparent when you see the animation...

Anyway, puppets:

Woolly monsters - my speciality. They are hand crocheted and have wire armatures. The purple one is made from a purple acrylic yarn crocheted together with magenta mohair so it has a fuzzy surface. The nature of fuzzy surfaces when animated is going to be used as a feature in this monster. The blue details are a mixture of acrylic and fuzzy polyester yarn. The green monster is a combination of bright green and mustard coloured acrylic yarns and a grassy green acrylic wool blend. The eyes are made of uncovered white plastic self-cover buttons (the ones that are designed to be covered with fabric) and the locking disks on the back of them can be used to secure the eyes in place. The pupils are black buttons attached with white-tack so they can be moved around. I have not made the replacement mouths yet, but they will be felt donut mouths.

Here are some photos of how they were made. First I crocheted the skin of the monsters. I find it easiest to make the skin first, then make the armature to fit. Each monster was crocheted as four sections: the head/body, a trouser shaped section and two arms. After I'd made the skin, I placed the segments together, drew round them and made an armature from aluminium arnature wire and epoxy putty to fit the shape, leaving plenty of room for padding. I didn't add hands to the armature at this point so that I could still thread the arm wires through the skin. The feet have flange-nuts inside the epoxy putty to act as tie-downs.

I padded the armatures with polyester wadding, usually used in quilting, glued to the wire with Copydex (latex adhesive) and fixed in place with fabric strapping, usually used in first aid.

Then I 'dressed' the monsters in their skins adding extra stuffing where needed, then added hands made of epoxy putty and wire. I wrapped the wire fingers and the wire antenna in Copydex and yarn to make them thicker and rubbery. I threaded short lengths of french knitting onto the fingers and this grips to the rubbery surface to stop it sliding around. Then I finished sewing on the arms.

Now I just have to make the mouths then on to building the set - expect excessive use of LEDs, resistors and pretend alien technology...

Adventures in wholesale land

2008-08-01T17:01:00.000-07:00

This afternoon Daz came home from work early and took me to Stax. It is a HUGE wholesale warehouse in Walkden near Manchester. You have to be a business and have a membership card to get in, and there is a £50 minimum spend, but luckily Daz has a card and had a big shopping list for work, so I just added my stuff to his bill and gave him the cash.

The place is amazing! It sells everything from powertools and every type of DIY material you can imagine to TVs and stationery, and all at a fraction of retail prices. I ended up leaving with a big assortment of goodies, including a dremel-type multitool thingy (it's not a Dremel, it's a Supatool apparently) which I have gone halves on with Daz, although it was only £12! I also got a set of drill bits, 5 packs of standard Milliput (£1.30 each, can you believe it?), two packs of superfine white Milliput (£2.50 each), some spray paint, lots of white-tack (35p a pack), a variety of types of sticky tape, packing materials and various nuts and bolts and other interesting bits and bobs.

Daz seemed to mainly be buying hundreds of pan scourers and some contraptions for making holes in tiles... something to do with building swimming pools I assume.

I've saved myself a small fortune on Milliput alone! I am now going with Daz on all his work errands to Stax.

Basket cases and sea-creatures....

2008-07-29T18:03:00.000-07:00

My mum took early retirement last week after many years of teaching 6 and 7 year olds. She was passionate about using art and craft to teach children, and had a stock room brimming with all sorts of amazing craft goodies she had collected over the decades. Anyway, knowing that a lot of the older more obscure items would be thrown in a skip as soon as she left, she rescued me something. She knows how much I love to collect random stuff that 'will come in useful one day' so she presented me with The Arnold Basketry Kit. It looks like it was made in the late 70s (so it might even be older than me!) and it's a huge heavy box full of all kinds of wicker, raffia, coloured plastic strips, coloured wire, bits of interestingly shaped wood and big wooden beads. I've stuck some pictures below. I'm sure I will find many prop and scenery making uses for it all.

Thanks Mum - you know me so well x x x

WARNING: The next part of this post should not be read by Shelley Noble if she wants her Halfland sea-creatures to be a surprise when they arrive!

I have made two things to send to Shelley Noble for the underwater sequence in her Halfland film (her blog 'Notes From Halfland' is linked to on the right).

The first is the illegitimate love-child of a starfish and a child's abandoned woolly glove (an unusual union I grant you). It doesn't have a clever half themed name I'm afraid. It looks kinda like a Doug to me....

It is hand crocheted from yellow and purple acrylic yarn, and has a aluminium wire and epoxy putty armature and a tie-down in the bottom. It is padded with polyfibre wadding and his eyes are (fairly obviously) small stacks of buttons. Its five legs/fingers are all poseable.

The other thing I made is shoal of 'Alphabafish'. They are half letter, half fish, they are made up of the letters of the first half of the alphabet, and the blue fish spell H A L F. The photos aren't great I'm afraid.

The fish are made from square wooden beads with letters on them, mounted on aluminium armature wire with the fish shape sculpted around them in superfine white Milliput (high grade epoxy putty). The eyes started as plastic and glass beads sunk into the putty. When the putty was hard I painted the fish with Games Workshop model paints mixed to the colours I wanted. When this was dry I covered the painted area of the fish with PVA glue then added glass seed beads to the surface with a pin. When the glue dried I gave the fish another thick coat of PVA to make sure the beads stayed firmly in place and to protect the paint from damage.

I stuck the other ends of the wire securely into a blob of epoxy putty which was fixed to a ball joint I'd taken from a 'helping hands' magnifier (I made sure things were 'T' shaped so nothing could pull out of the putty). This was then all fixed to a basic ball jointed rig (made from the rest of the 'helping hands'). This should allow Shelley to animate the fish individually and as an entire shoal.

I have boxed them up and they are ready to post to California tomorrow!

Still not got around to doing my soundbite challenge animation of drunken monsters... hoping to find time, just very busy with other random stuff, like making the puppets for the short I am collaborating with Steee on.

I'm a busy busy monster

2008-07-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

Today is mine and Daz's anniversary! Four years since we got together, one year since we got engaged. We will be doing something special at the weekend, but for tonight we are celebrating with a Chinese takeaway and a DVD.

I am absolutely exhausted at the moment because I did a half hour long talk about Asperger's Syndrome to a room of 30 psychiatrists this afternoon. I loathe public speaking, so I feel like I've just finished sitting an 8 hour exam. Urgh. Still, if it helps other folk then it's worth it, plus I get a bit of cash for doing it which I can spend on exciting stuff like a hood for my camcorder and more set building materials.

Exciting news: A Canadian monster called Sebastian has arrived in the post! He is my prize for getting third place in the TAIS Monsterjam. He is handmade, fleecy and has huge pants. He has now taken up residence on our sofa. His label says he has been going through bit of a melodramatic phase - for the past few years. He didn't seem too happy about spending a week in a box, but he has settled in well, although Daz is a little jealous of all the attention Sebastian is getting. Below is a terrible photo of me (yes, I did cut my own hair...), with Sebastian looking rather startled.

On the animation front, I am collaborating with a friend of mine, Steeeeee, sorry, Steven Hutchinson for my next animation. He is a writer, film director, musician, cameraman, film producer, occasional actor and lover of all things creative who is going to write a script and do some voice work for me. Then I'm going to animate it and we will enter it to a Bristol based short film festival and the Bacup film festival which Steee helps organise.

Next job: make a Halfland sea-creature for Shelley Noble....

Sneak preview of my music video animation...

2008-07-12T12:44:00.000-07:00

I've finished post-production on the animated segment for the music video. I'm putting a sneak preview of it here on my blog because I'm not going to put it up on my youtube channel until the full music video has been released. This is the full 10 seconds I animated for the video anyway:

The video is for a song called 'Smile' by The Leano, a rapper and spoken word artist from London. He wanted the video to be made up of animated segments by different artists from all over the world, with the animated characters lip-syncing along.

You can find out more about The Leano here: www.myspace.com/leanoland
and here: http://www.youtube.com/TheLeano

More behind the scenes stuff...

2008-07-12T10:59:00.000-07:00

Here are some more photos of the behind-the-scenes work for my alien animation for the music video:

Here are the replacement mouths for the alien blobs. They are all made of black and white card with clay on the back and clay lips. The blue lips for the big blob consist of the mouth shapes for the different phonemes. Here is a tip to save time when making donut mouths - phoneme AI becomes L if you add a tongue and U becomes Th. It's not a perfect match but it's close enough, which is all you need with donut mouths. I also made a smiling mouth and a rest shape. The mouths for the little blobs are just smiles and 'ooooo' shapes.

This is the method I devised so the blobs could 'dance' smoothly. Originally the plan was to have them swaying, but because the Newplast is so hard and the blobs are so chunky, I couldn't bend their bodies side-to-side enough. Instead I decided they should turn from side-to-side - but how to do that without grating their plasticine bottoms all over my lumpy set floor?

Washers and petroleum jelly was the solution I came up with. I used rubber washers for the bigger blobs and a little steel washer for the small green blob. I coated the washers in petroleum jelly so they would glide smoothly, then put the washer over the tie-down hole on the bottom of the blob before fixing it to the set floor. It seemed to work - there was only a minimal amount of grated plasticine left on the set floor when I'd finished animating. This method also made the blobs appear to be floating slightly above the ground, and what could be more alien than that?

Here is a photo I took of the set just after I finished animating to show my terribly high-tech set up. Yes, that's TWO angle-poise lamps with daylight bulbs, I bought the second one especially for this project. I glued the lamps in position with a hot glue gun this time, after having a few problems with slowly drooping lamps and mid-animation collisions between my head and the lamps in the past. The knobs on the lamp that are supposed to tighten and hold the lamps in position are less than useless. It's going to be a fun job trying to pick all the hardened glue off the lamp joints though... ho hum. The pot on the left contains my modelling tools and the tray on the right has the replacement mouths on it. At the bottom left you can just see my camcorder on it's tripod, and left of that, out of shot, is a small foldable table with my laptop on it.

The other thing I'd like to mention is the importance of having your animation space set up in an ergonomically friendly manner. The first two animations I made, I had the table far too low which meant I spent hours stooping over and kneeling down, even shuffling around on my knees between my laptop and the puppets. Big mistake. I felt no pain whilst I was animating because I was so absorbed in what I was doing, but the next day I woke up to find that every muscle in my body ached and I physically couldn't straighten my knees or spine which made me walk like a very old goblin.

Now I have raised my animation table by about 8" so I don't have to stoop at all when I animate. Unfortunately my laptop is still on a low table, but I put a dining chair in front of it so I can sit down to check a frame instead of bending over. Now I don't get back or knee pain from animating, although I do end up with a bruised arse from all the getting up and down. Ideally I'd get a taller table so I don't have to keep sitting down every few minutes, but I don't know where I'd find a very tall, very narrow foldable table. I think next time I'll just put a cushion on the chair.

So yes, make sure your animation table is tall enough or you'll pay for it next day!

Alien Blobs!

2008-07-08T17:07:00.000-07:00

I have almost finished making my happy alien blob puppets for the music video - they don't have any mouths yet. Luckily only the big blob speaks, so that cuts down on the number of replacement mouths I have to make. All of them have to be able to smile and go 'ooooo' though.

Here is the blob construction process so far:

Here is a photo of the raw materials - lots of Lewis Newplast in a range of colours. The greeny grey mushroomy things at the bottom are hardened epoxy putty over some nuts. These will form the core of the clay blobs and act as tie-downs, fixing the puppets to the set floor. The things in the packet at the top are rubber tipped modelling tools, which I ended up hardly using on these puppets, as the shapes where so simple.

These are the basic shapes of the alien blobs. They don't look like they took long to make, but they took all night, because Newplast is so hard. I had to knead small strips at a time to make it malleable enough to work with, yet I still ended up with sore bruised patches on my palms the next day from working with it. The price you pay for using a clay that won't go mushy under hot lights.

I thought about brushing down the surfaces with a quick-drying solvent to smooth out any lumps, bumps and fingerprints, but I decided I rather like the fact they are a bit rough and ready and imperfect - after all, most living creatures are!

For these puppets I decided to make the eyeballs out of polymer clay (Fimo Soft) instead of just painting pupils on beads. I rolled white clay into balls, baked them in the oven until they were hard, then added pupils with black clay, put pin holes in them to help with movement, then baked them again.

This is Big Blob without his mouth. His antler thingies are made of hardened Fimo Soft, and most of the details are made of Flair Plasticine (softer and more melty than Newplast, but has brighter colours).

Here is a photo of the whole colony of alien blobs. I'm pleased because they look exactly how they did in my head before I made them. The little purple one is all Flair Plasticine and has no tie-down because he is going to scoot about a bit.

Now I think it's time for a cup of tea, then back to making mouths for them...

Domo, sketchbook swapping and more very useful gifts from Daz...

2008-07-05T13:19:00.000-07:00

Daz bought me a couple of badges last week with a cute monster character called Domo on them. I typed his name into google to find out a bit more about him and it turns out he is the star of his own stop-motion TV series, look: http://www.domonation.com/
He's a brown plush monster with a big mouth who sweats a lot, and he apparently started off life as a Japanese TV station mascot appearing in animated channel idents, and now he has his own show in the US on Nickelodeon. Anyway, I think he's rather endearing.

Other news:
John Hankins (castlegardener), the animator who sent me the samurai puppet has had an inspired idea for an international sketchbook swap which I am excited to be taking part in. Basically 10 animators from around the world buy a sketchbook each. You do five drawings then mail your sketchbook to the next person in the circle, who does five more sketches, then mails it on again and so on... Several months later each artist gets their own sketchbook back, filled with sketches by every artist taking part. I am between Nofby (Newcastle, UK) who sends the sketchbooks to me, and Emmyymme (Winnipeg, Canada) who I post the books on to. I think it's going to be a really interesting and hopefully it will be the first of many more sketchbook swaps.

I mentioned in a previous post about my boyfriend always surprising me with unusual yet very useful gifts. Well last week he excelled himself by coming back from a work trip to the big trade wholesale store with two packs of superfine white milliput (the stuff that's usually most expensive) and a pint bottle of Copydex (liquid latex). What more could a woman ask for? :)

Woohoo woohoo, I won a monster!

2008-06-30T09:08:00.000-07:00

My grim guesthouse short (the monster under the bed animation) won third prize in the Toronto Animated Image Society monsterjam competition! I have no idea why the judges picked me - I am sure there were lots and lots of animations that were better than mine, Grant's included - but nevertheless I came third.... despite the fact I've never even been to Canada!

I won a Monster Factory handmade plush monster toy, which is very exciting too, especially as they are one of the companies that inspired me to start making my own woolly monsters, long before I even thought about trying to animate them. Rather fitting prize really. I am eagerly awaiting my parcel from Canada containing something cute and monstrous...

Alien scenery and plants...

2008-06-12T14:38:00.000-07:00

The alien plants are finished, and I've nearly finished the set for my alien animation.

Here are the alien plants, all latexed up and shiny and bobbly:

Then there is the planet surface, which is almost finished (the photo was taken whilst parts of it were still wet):

The large hill is polystyrene cut into a vague hill shape with a hot wire tool, the smaller hills are crumpled newspaper. I stuck these to a sheet of particle board, then made a paper-mache 'clay' by soaking shredded newspaper in a mixture of PVA glue and water, mixing occasionally with my hands until it had a texture like wet clay. I spread an unever layer of this over everything, then when it was slightly drier I smoothed PVA over the surface with my hand to smooth and seal it. All in all it took about 1 litre (that's 2 pints) of PVA and 4 free local newspapers.

I bought some emulsion paint tester pots - fireside (a dark rich red), sundried tomato (a darkish orangey red) and classic red (bright post-box red). When the planet surface was dry, I painted it with the three shades of red in a blotchy manner. When that dried I made a mixture of PVA glue and dark red paint and spread on a thick layer before sprinkling 'coarse iron ore ballast' (from a hobby shop) onto it. Before the glue dried fully (but dry enough to stick the ballast in place) I painted on a thin layer of watered down PVA/paint mixture to firmly fix it, and make the colour of the ballast match the painted surface more. When that was dry I painted on a 'dirty wash' (black drawing ink, red drawing ink, a little dark red paint and quite a bit of water) so it would sink into the recesses on the set and make them darker. After that, I dry brushed a little bright 'classic red' paint across the surface to highlight the texture.

I might be adding some blue crystal clusters on the surface too, but I'm not sure yet.

I've also done the sky, which is purple:

It is a sheet of white foamboard (still 2 for 1 at the craft shop - woohoo!) which I took into the back yard and covered in spray paint. I used mostly spray paint I had left over from my student days when I worked with it a lot. I used navy blue, burgundy red, metallic purple, dark purple and light violet. The photo isn't too good because I took it when the paint was still wet, and very reflective.

Next it's onto puppet building...

More prop and scenery construction

2008-06-06T12:53:00.000-07:00

I have my first commission, woohoo! It's a short (less that 15 seconds) slot for a music video. I've been given total creative freedom, so I am having a lot of fun with the set and puppet designs. I am setting it on an alien planet, so I can go wild with the plants and scenery which, for me anyway, is all very exciting!

I have also been constructing props and scenery for the short I am planning to make with the samurai puppet that John Hankins sent me. This project is currently on hold though until I finish the commission. I made John a rather endearing puppet and sent it to him the other day, but I can't say any more about it until it arrives in Hawaii because I don't want to spoil John's surprise.

Here are some photos of the scenery I have made so far for the samurai animation, which will be set in a garden. Please note that I am going for a very stylised look - these aren't meant to be realistic! Sorry about the bad photos. My studio has no natural light (for animation purposes) so I took them with a flash, and they don't look great.

These are some fruit trees for the background of the scene. They are wire covered in papier-mache then painted. The foliage is made of snipped up green pan scourers, and the fruits are yellow plastic ball bearings (for shooting from BB guns).

These are ornamental rose trees made from builders 'mice' wire (usually used in reinforced concrete) wrapped round papier-mache balls, which have been painted green. Then I glued on paper leaves and ribbon roses.

Here are an assortment of background bushes. They are papier-mache again. The two on the left are covered in three shades of embroidery silk snipped up and layered with Copydex (liquid latex). The one on the right is snipped up pan scourers. The 'flowers' are pearlescent seed beeds.

This is a garden ornament or memorial of some description. It's a small plastic tub with a cotton reel, a thimble, a button and a dome headed nut glued to the top of it (all junk I have collected over the years), then painted to look like marble and bronze (sort of).

The great thing about all these bits of scenery is that they are made of junk and very cheap materials. My boyfriend gave me a bucket of steel wire 'mice' as a present (other women get flowers, I get builders tools and materials - which is good because I do prefer getting random hardware) so that was free. The papier-mache is obviously just old newpapers and watered down cheap PVA glue. The green pan scourers, yellow plastic BBs and embroidery silks were bought in bulk packs from £1 shops. The silk roses were 3p each from the sewing stall on Bolton market. The most expensive material was the Copydex, which was £4 for a small bottle, but for future Copydex purchases I have found a supplier where I can buy the stuff in 1 litre and 5 litre bottles at a discount price.

I'm mid-way through making some alien plants for the commissioned animation. Here are the photos of how I made the basic structures:

These are some bobbly plants which are made from some round door knobs I got in a bulk value pack from B&Q and those useful little yellow BBs again. I had to use good old fashioned 'strong glue' for sticking the balls on, as with PVA and Copydex the set up time was too long and superglue was not tacky enough (too watery). The strong glue worked well, as it partially melted the plastic coating on the doorknobs, which seemed to increase the 'grab' and reduce the set up time of the glue. One thing I would advise - don't make 6 of these in an unventilated room like I did. After a while those little BBs looked like they were moving around of their own accord and the next morning I had a banging hangover. In future I will dig out my vapour mask to use for jobs like this!

These plants will be painted with layers of coloured liquid latex, to make them look shiny, rubbery and...well...like alien plants I suppose.

This is a slightly out of focus photo of some alien trees. They are 'tumble drier balls' (£1 shop) with trunks made from wire coated in epoxy putty. As you can see, they are being painted with layers of purple liquid latex. Details will be added later with a contrasting shade of liquid latex.

I will post photos of the finished alien plants soon.

I have also made a space castle or an elaborate rocketship (or whatever you want it to be) to go in the background.

It is a bizarre combination of interesting bits and bobs I have collected over the years. Two wooden door knobs, a cedarwood moth repellant disk thingy, some wooden cocktail forks, two glue tube lids and an assortment of different beads. It was decorated with acrylic paint and plastic 'gems'.

Grey Heights Guesthouse

2008-05-11T15:26:00.000-07:00

My second TAIS MonsterJam entry, 'Grey Heights Guesthouse' is finished! I'm ahead of schedule, now I just have to post my entries to Canada.

Here it is:

Yup, it's short, but 10 seconds is not a lot of time to tell a story in! It was inspired by my fiance Daz, who spends a lot of time staying in B&Bs and guesthouses when he's working away. Some of the places he has stayed in have been very very grim. You know you are staying in a real budget guesthouse when the monster under the bed looks more comfy than the bed itself!

I shot the entire thing in a different way to my previous shorts. Because my puppets usually speak, I normally have to plan my animations frame by frame to fit with a pre-recorded soundtrack. This time I planned nothing. I knew I had to shoot it as at least two different scenes, and finally decided on three during shooting. I knew what needed to happen, so I just animated the characters, taking as many frames as it took. Then in post-production I could adjust the speed of movements by cutting frames or slow them down by duplicating frames. I could also get rid of a few bad frames, where a body part was not moving in a smooth line, because that female puppet was an awkward sod to animate smoothly. I then cut the three sections so that they would fit together as one sequence of 300 frames.

I lit the set using reflected light from an angle poise lamp with a 60W daylight simulation bulb, bounced off the off-white wall to the right of my animation table and onto the set. The darkened room effect I did in post-production, layering a circular gradient getting darker at the edges onto the frames, one frame at a time (yawn...). The light fades were done the same way, adding a transparent black layer and changing the opacity from frame to frame. I also had to edit out a major blanket movement crisis in the section where she is stroking the monster's hand. The blanket was taped in place and sprayed with hairspray to stiffen it... and then I went and leant on it mid-scene, because I am a clumsy fool.

The sound was added later in what I can only describe as an experimental trial-and-error fashion along with some basic maths as I know nothing about sound editing. The various sounds are a recording of me roaring before stuffing a pillow in my face and some sound clips shared free of charge by their creators on www.soundsnap.com. I then layered together me roaring, two different creaky bed noises, a background storm, some spooky orchestral chords and a music box. It is probably a horrific mess, but I did my best!

The puppet arrived from Hawaii!

2008-05-09T05:58:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday I recieved a box through the post containing.... a female samurai warrior complete with sword! John (Hankins - the guy who made her) has truly excelled himself! She is an amazing puppet, with a proper ball jointed armature. She has a great 'no nonsense, not easily impressed' look about her. Basically she is the exact opposite of all my clay and woolly puppets. I can't wait to animate her and I am busy thinking up stories for her, along with ideas of what monstrous puppet I should create for John in return!

Here is a photo of the travelling samurai meeting the locals for the first time:

After some initial tension, the woolly monsters decided that she seemed friendly enough, despite the sword and the fact she doesn't speak much. Everyone then settled down for tea and cakes, followed by the monsters attempting some hula-dancing to make her feel at home (home being Hawaii, not Japan...). We think she is in Bolton trying to avenge something, it's just that we haven't been able to work out what.

The other photo I have to show you all is THE FIRST PROPER WOOLLY MONSTER PUPPET which I know you've all been waiting for!

He is the second character for the grim guesthouse short. He doesn't stand up (hence the reason he is leaning drunkenly against a bed) and has no tie-downs because he is an under-bed monster, and everyone knows that thay spend their entire lives lying down (it's true you know!).

He's got a armature wire and epoxy putty armature padded with polyester wadding wrapped round the wire. His skin is double crochet (which is different to American double crochet - be warned!), striped and worked in rounds. In future I must remember to use treble crochet stitch (again different to America) which stretches more and will be easier to get over the armature.

His fingers are french knitting (done on a wooden bobbin with four nails hammered into it) threaded over armature wire. The facial features are coloured felt cut to shape and are all movable or replaceable. I might give him some eyebrows too actually, for added expression.

Set building on the cheap...

2008-05-07T17:41:00.000-07:00

I'm nearly done building the grim guesthouse bedroom set for my second entry to MonsterJam (the one with the pyjama girl puppet in it). It's the most elaborate set I've built so far but it's not been too difficult and more importantly, it's been cheap. If there's one thing you learn being an cash-strapped illusration student, it's how to utilise very cheap materials to good effect (especially when you make large wood, spray-paint and collage creations like I used to). I thought I'd show you how I spent as little as possible whilst building a set that looks like the worst hotel room you've ever seen.

Things you will need:

two sheets of foamboard or stiff cardboard box card (I just used foamboard because it was on special offer!)
some thick grey board (cardboard)

one cheap nasty carpet tile (about £2 from a DIY store) or a carpet sample

a roll of wide double sided high tack carpet tape

some lengths of basswood in two different thicknesses (or something similar) for making the bed

a brown and a black oil pastel

a really cheap horrible eyeshadow set in shades of brown and grey - the kind you get from pound shops (you could also use powdered dry pastels if you wanted)

extra hold hairspray

a hot glue gun

a junior hacksaw

a stanley knife

a metal rule

a big tub of cheap white household emulsion paint

You'll either need tubes of yellow and yellow ochre acrylic paints (to tint the white emulsion), or some paint tester pots in a few different shades in the 'nicotine yellow' range.

Whilst you are in the DIY store, take some very generous samples from the nastiest textured wallpapers that will work on a small scale.

First cut the sheets of board to the size you want the two sides of the set to be, then put them at right angles to each other and tape the inside edge with masking tape. Use the hot glue gun to glue the edges of the joint together from the outside. This stops lumpy glue collecting in the inside corner of your set. Cut two strips of thick grey card to be skirting boards. Paint them first with pine/ochre coloured emulsion or acrylic paint. When that dries paint them badly with white emulsion. When that's dry distress them lighty with some sandpaper and add scuff marks with smudged brown/black oil pastel. Glue the skirting boards to the bottom of the set with the glue gun.

Get the high tack carpet tape and put vertical strips of it on the walls of your set. You can leave gaps of a few inches, but you must use two strips in the corner (one on each wall). Peel of the backing strips one at a time and stick the wallpaper down carefully. In the corner peel off the first strip and stick the paper down then push the paper into the corner with a metal rule before peeling of the second strip. Don't use glue to stick the paper on, and don't paint directly onto the board - it will warp as it dries. I used two patterns of wallpaper for that genuine 'last decorated 40 years ago on a budget' look. I ripped the join between the papers, so it looks like the paper has peeled off. Badly paint the walls in a patchy manner with some lovely nicotine yellow paint. Either mix your own with a little yellow ochre acrylic in some white emulsion, or use a tester pot. I painted the two walls slightly different shades and added some paler 'retouches' to add to the general grimness.

When all that is dry, get out the eyeshadow set and use it to add stains, dirt, mould, damp and decay to the wallpaper and skirting board. You can use your fingers for bigger bits and a brush for finer detail like damp trails down the walls. When you are done, spray the whole thing liberally with hairspray to fix it.

For the bed, measure your puppet. Estimate how big you think it would be in real life. Work out the scale. Find standard measurements of the type of bed you want to make on an internet furniture store. Calculate the scaled down measurements of the bed. Cut the lengths of basswood to the lengths you need with a hacksaw. I used 1/2" square for the uprights and some smaller stuff for the rest. Glue it all together with the glue gun. Try not to get too many big blobs of glue on the visible parts of the bed, but don't worry too much if you do. It doesn't matter if the bed is wonky - it is supposed to look like it has been there since the 60s, and has been repaired badly many times. Cut a sheet of grey board to fit in the bottom of the bed. Glue gun it to the underside of the frame. Paint the whole thing with a first coat of paint in a colour of your choice. I chose a nice youth hostel blue. For the next coat I chose a pale yellow, and for the top layer I used a cream colour. Put the layers on thick but patchy to make the bed look like it has been repainted a lot. When it's dry, distress the bed with sandpaper and a use a stanley knife to scrape through the layers of paint in places. Make the bedframe look dirty with eyeshadow and fix it with hairspray.

Mess up the carpet tile a bit with soime oil pastels. The framed sign on the wall is just a frame made of grey board then painted, on top of a grubby looking handwritten sign. The mattress is two sheets of upholstery foam glued together, with some polyester wadding lumpy bits taped on, then covered with a piece of fabric. The pillow is just a miniature pillow I made. The blanket is a micro-fibre cloth. Glue everything down with the glue gun and you are finished.

First MonsterJam entry complete!

2008-04-30T16:13:00.000-07:00

I've just finished editing my first entry for the TAIS MonsterJam. It features two alien monsters being let down by their super-advanced technology. I decided to really utilise the properties of clay in this animation.

I made a special clay blend for the bodies of the aliens so that it would be exactly the colour and consistency I needed. I thoroughly kneaded about 2 parts Flair Plasticine into 3 parts Newplast, so that the end result was easily workable, but would remain fairly solid under hot lights. The features and decorations on the aliens are Flair Plasticine.

The set was made out of an A1 sheet of grey cardboard painted with household emulsion paint and acrylic paint in a range of browns and greens. I dabbed on some splotches of watered down PVA glue, then a random scattering of short dark green flock, some lighter green fake grass type flock and some gravel (all Games Workshop modelling stuff). I followed this with a few blobs of dyed green moss (usually used for flower arranging) soaked in watered down PVA to make them more rigid. I then glued the board to the top of my animation table (which is a sheet of particle board).

The sky is a sheet of white foam board painted with blue and white household emulsion, then glued to the table and supported by a couple of L shaped metal brackets. The trees in the background are grey card painted with a blotchy range of green paints, then I glued on several layers of the dyed moss with plenty of PVA glue. For the different trees I followed this either with some light long green flock, some mixed greek herbs (yes really) or some splodges of coloured paint. When they were dry I fixed the trees to the set with blue tack and more metal L brackets.

During the animation I added the clay in thin layers and smoothed it down to make the aliens gradually grow. It was a lot of fun to make - more 'hands on' than my previous animations.

This is my first animation with my new camcorder and studio set-up. I no longer have to reach OVER the camera and animate animate sideways. Woohoo! Plus the 3CCD and Leica lens means I get a nice picture. The only thing that is worse with my new 'tripod on floor' set-up is that it is very obvious if the animation set moves, whereas when I had the webcam fixed to the same table as the set, table movement mattered less. This was also the first time I've shot at 30fps which was interesting.

The hard part was editing the animation frame by frame to add the teleport beam and the end credit. It truly was mind numbing. I'm sure there are much quicker and easier ways of doing it, but I can't afford the fancy software!

Puppet from Hawaii!

2008-04-28T15:41:00.001-07:00

I am getting a puppet from Hawaii! Woohoo! Animator John Hankins is sending me a specially made ball-joint armatured puppet. A few weeks back I had an insomnia induced idea for an puppet foreign exchange scheme. I mentioned the idea on the http://www.stopmotionanimation.com/ forum and people seemed to like it, so now I am going to be the first recipient of a puppet.

As soon as I'm finished with my TAIS Monster Jam animations I'm going to make John a puppet in return and send it to him. I am quite jealous of my as yet unmade puppet - I'd like to go to Hawaii too!

Behind the scenes stuff on my Monster Jam entries, plus new animations coming very soon!

My first human puppet

2008-04-10T17:11:00.000-07:00

I've just finished the first puppet for my monster short. It is my first human puppet, and the first time I've used the latex build-up method, which I have now become a big fan of. I'm looking forward to experimenting some more with the technique because It'll be great for making elaborate monsters with slimy looking skin.

I changed the story for my short after realising the first idea was too derivative. The short will now be set in a grim guesthouse bedroom. I had to make a puppet to play the role of the guest, complete with pyjamas and fluffy slippers. Here she is finished:

Her proportions are way off - her hands, head and boobs are too big, her body is too long, legs too short, her feet are tiny (compared with her hands) and she has very narrow hips and no bottom (oops!). She's also very pale, but that is intentional. I quite like her, but whether she'll stand up to animation is another matter.

Here is how I made her:

First I made an armature out of 1/16" aluminium armature wire twisted together and Milliput epoxy putty. The feet are epoxy putty over looped wire and M6 sized nuts for the tie-downs. If I made her again I'd use 4 strands of wire for the legs to make them stiffer, but unfortunately I only used 2 strands. She was fine until I put the heavy head on, then the legs became a bit too springy under the extra weight. I think I'll be able to animate her ok, although she might have to shuffle when she walks because she wobbles about too much if she lifts up one leg (doesn't everyone shuffle in slippers anyway?). I made her bones from tightly wound zinc oxide tape (the fabric adhesive tape you buy in chemists). They are slightly flexible, so don't put as much strain on the joints as epoxy putty bones would.

I padded the armature with polyester wadding (from a sewing shop) glued to the tape bones with Copydex (from any craft shop or stationers) then secured it with more tape.

I sculpted the head of the puppet from flesh coloured Fimo Soft, which is a polymer clay. I made sure the eye sockets fitted the beads I was going to use as eyeballs, and made a hole in the base of the head for the neck loop of my armature to go in. When I was happy with it I baked the head in the oven to harden it. Once it had cooled I glued the head onto the neck loop with strong glue (Bostick to be precise) and fixed the eyeball beads temporarily in their sockets with a little plasticine.

I then started building up thin layers of Copydex (which is liquid latex) on the hands and head, brushing on a coat before waiting for it to dry and repeating the process. After four or five coats of plain liquid latex, which dries clear and yellowish, I made a batch of tinted latex. I coloured the latex with a tiny amount of Games Workshop model paint (white mixed with flesh colour) which are ideal because they are high pigment low viscosity acrylic paints, plus Daz has bottles and bottles of the stuff in every colour imaginable for painting his miniatures. I made sure I mixed a large enough quantity to finish the hands and head, then stored the tinted liquid latex in an air-tight container

I applied layers of the tinted liquid latex to the hands, paying plenty of attention to the fingers, until the colour was uniform and they were roughly hand shaped. Then I applied smaller blobs of latex to build up the fleshy parts of the palm and the knuckles.

This photo shows the hardened head without latex and the partially completed latex build-up hands.

I continued to build-up the front of the head with layers of the tinted latex, making sure I didn't block the nostrils. I built up eyelids over the eyeballs, because the eyeballs can be peeled out of the stretchy dried latex eyelids afterwards, then painted and talced so they will move. The back of the head I covered in 6ply embroidery silk in two shades of brown, snipped into 1-2cm lengths and stuck to the head with plain liquid latex. Then I covered this with another layer of plain liquid latex and added more 'hair'. After four layers I added a last coat of latex on top of the hair so it became sort of rubberised and would stay still during animation.

The head of the puppet half-way through the latex build-up process.

When I was happy with the result of the latex build-up, I added freckles with a little watered down acrylic paint. If you use acrylic paint over latex in a flexible area of the puppet, the paint will crack and flake, but I reckon I can get away with a few freckles on the cheeks (which don't move). I gave the head and hands a light dusting of talc to make them a bit less shiny and to stop things sticking to them, then put dark shadows rounds her eyes with a little powder eyeshadow (I've never come across this method in my research, but it did the trick). I carefully peeled out the eye beads which was tricky, painted on some pupils and talced the beads before pushing them back into their sockets with a little extra plasticine behind them to bring them further forward.

Next thing to do was dress the puppet. I bought a set of huge and hideous knickers from a pound shop, some in plain pastels, some patterned, because the patterns were small enough to work on a small scale and they were perfect pyjama material. My first approach was to hand sew a pair of pyjamas, which looked great, but were impossible to get on to the puppet due to the big head, hands and feet. Instead I opted for gluing the clothes onto the puppet piece by piece. Not very professional, but it was the only way I could see of doing it (if I had sewn the clothes onto the puppet, the seams would be on the outside and look awful). The slippers were made from pink microfibre cloth (multipack from the pound shop) glued to the feet with copydex, then trimmed to fit.

The eyebrows and mouth are a very cheap plasticine-type modelling clay (pound shop again!) which is medium hardness and came in a pack of 30 really unusual colours. This is so the mouth and brows can be moved and replaced to change the puppet's expression. The colour does transfer to the latex a little. but can be removed with a damp finger. Eventually the oil content in the clay will degrade the latex, but for a 10 second short I'm not too worried about that.

And that's it. One finished puppet.

New 'MONSTER' Project

2008-04-01T11:47:00.000-07:00

I am just starting work on my first 'proper' stop-motion animation project (the first two shorts were really just glorified tests). The plan is to enter it into a Toronto based animation competition. Yes, I know I'm not Canadian, but the competition is open to all, and all the selected shorts will be edited together and shown at the summer animation showcase at the National Film Board cinema in Toronto, which sounds terribly impressive. Thankyou to Grant Dix who told me about this competition - he's a Canadian animator and you can see his work here: http://grantsanimation.blogspot.com/

The brief is to create a 10 second animated short which features monsters in some way (ha ha, this brief could have been written for me!). I'll have to shoot it at 30fps, which is what video runs at in Canada. I've not decided whether to shoot on ones or twos yet. 30fps seems like a ridiculous amount and will call for such tiny movements... I might do some tests to see which feels and looks better.

I have a story worked out. Well it isn't really a story, more of a 'build-up followed by punchline', but I can't really do much more than that in 10 seconds! The gag is slightly ripped off from Monsters Inc. and any number of children's books, but I suppose nothing is ever truly original.

I need to build the set, some trees, one human puppet, one big woolly monster puppet, one basic flying rig and possibly a simple dolly set-up if I have time. Then I need to shoot it, edit it and send it to Canada. All in less than two months... argh!

Oh yes, I bought a camcorder! A Panasonic NV-GS330, which is supposed to be about the best camcorder for under £400. I spent the cash that was supposed to be going into my 'postgraduate study' fund, but as my Mum pointed out, I'll never even get on a postgrad course if I keep shooting with a terrible camera!

Behind the scenes

2008-03-31T08:09:00.000-07:00

For the benefit of Hazel (my sister who lives in Belgium), who wants to see how I'd made my first two animations, I am going to do a 'behind-the-scenes' look at the processes involved. I learned all the techniques and information I used, from three fantastic websites : http://www.stopmotionanimation.com/, http://www.stopmoshorts.com/, and http://www.stopmotionworks.com/.

The first thing I did was make the puppets. My first puppet was short, sturdy and going to stay still, so he was made solely from clay.

For my clay puppets I used Lewis' Newplast (hard, slightly dull range of colours, used by professional animators), Tallon Fun Plastic (quite soft, cheap, ok colours, aimed at kids) and Flair Plasticine (soft, good range of bright colours, aimed at kids). I used the harder Newplast to make the main bodies of the puppets, and used the softer clays for adding features and detail and building the removable mouths. In retrospect, the soft clays were a little too soft for this, especially under hot lights, and the Newplast was a little to stiff for easy movement, so in future I plan to make my puppets from Newplast and Plasticine blended together to the right consistency.

The second puppet was taller and I needed to move it's legs and tentacles, so I made a wire armature to support the clay and allow the puppet to be tied-down. I used 1/16" aluminium armature wire (available on the internet from specialist art suppliers), Milliput two-part epoxy putty and two M6 size nuts. I twisted two strands of the wire together before making the basic armature shape, then covered all the parts of the armature that needed to be rigid in epoxy putty (I did use a bit too much epoxy putty). For the feet I made loops in the wire, put a nut in the centre of each foot and covered it in epoxy putty, leaving the nut holes clear on the underside of the feet.

After the epoxy putty had hardened completely (4-6 hours), I covered the armature in clay to make my monster.

The next step is making eyes and mouths. The eyes are just white plastic beads with the pupils and the inside of the holes painted with acrylic model paint. They sit in sockets made of soft clay, so the eyes can be moved around with a pin.

The mouths are trickier, I made ten replacement mouths for the first puppet and thirteen for the second. The mouths are based on the Preston Blair phoneme series which shows the mouth shapes people use to make different sounds. I made a different mouth for each phoneme shape, plus a rest shape and a smile shape. The mouths are all made from black card mouth shapes, white card teeth and the lips are made from plasticine. They are fixed to the puppet with a tiny blob of white-tack.

I also had to prepare my set and work area. I blocked out all natural light by taping cardboard to the windows. The set was made entirely from things I had lying around. I fixed a carpet tile to my work-table with two mini G-clamps, the rest of the set was made of a cork notice board (the frame provided the skirting board in the set) covered in coloured paper and foam letters. This was then white-tacked to the wall behind the carpet tile. I used an angle-poise lamp clamped to the table, with a 100watt daylight simulation bulb, to light the set.

The first animation did not have proper tie-downs, but for the second one I had to drill two holes through the carpet tile and table to fix the puppets feet to the set floor. I use an adjustable trestle table to work on, so I can drill as many holes in the top as I want, then just replace the sheet of wood! To fix the puppet to the table using tie-downs, I push a long M6 bolt with a wing nut on it, up through the hole in the table. I screw it into the nut in the foot of the puppet, then tighten the wing nut under the table to secure the puppet.

Before I started animating I recorded the audio tracks, and edited them to make the voice sound like a child's. I used software called JLipSync to work out the sequence of mouth shapes, then made a 'dope-sheet' which told me exactly what the puppet should be doing in each frame.

I used a webcam fixed to the table, my laptop and a frame-grabbing programme called Monkey Jam to shoot the animation. The first animation was shot at 24 frames-per-second (the same rate as traditional film), the second was shot at 25fps (European video rate). The set up was far from ideal, as I sometimes had to reach over the webcam to adjust the puppet which had disasterous consequences on a few occassions. In future I will attach the camera to a full sized tripod further from the set, to avoid knocking it mid-animation.

Then it was time for the animating. The replacing of mouths is straight forward, but you have to check that the top teeth line up with the previous mouth, otherwise the mouth bounces around the face and it just looks odd. The body movements were trickier, and working with tie-downs took a bit of getting used to. The first animation was about 600 frames long, the second was slightly less. Each animation took about eight hours to shoot, althought I'm sure I'll get quicker with practice.

Edit it all together with sound in Windows Movie Maker, and ta-daaaa, a finished stop-motion animation!

So that's it I think. That is how to make a stop-motion animation in your spare bedroom with no special equipment. Have a go, it's tons of fun!

Animation number two...

2008-03-28T17:15:00.000-07:00

This is 'My hobbies', it's the follow-up to my first animation.

I've finally been able to make my second stop-motion animation. I'd waited days until Daz was working away for the night. I can't have him turning on electrical appliances whilst I'm animating because it makes the light dim which makes the video flicker.

Well it turned out that I may have well animated with him in the house, because my animation ended up being plagued by flicker anyway! First I thought it might be because the sun had begun to come up towards the end of shooting (I shoot at night because I work better) and my room isn't 100% light proof, but it had also begun to get light towards the end of the first film, and there's no flicker there.

I think the flicker is partly down to working with high winds and lashing rain outside causing the power to surge and dip. The most flickery part of the video (close to the end) was shot between 6.30 and 8am, and I think that every person in the area turning on toasters and boiling kettles might have caused some havoc with the electricity supply.

I also had trouble with my webcam, which seemed to develop a mind of it's own half way through, and increase the colour saturation. It doesn't even have a funtion to change saturation so I couldn't correct it! It also seems to 'bleed' darker colours into lighter ones if they are put next to each other. There is probably a technical term for this but I don't know what it is.

Making this animation was much more of a challenge than the first one, and although I don't feel it is as successful as the first, I did learn far more whilst making it.

The first and most important thing I learned:
lip-syncing an animation to a recorded soundtrack - EASY
giving a puppet natural looking body movement - HARD
I need to spend a lot of time looking at the way humans and animals move before I do it again.

The other things I learned:

Don't animate at breakfast time.
Don't cover circular epoxy putty feet (with tie-downs) in a thick layer of plasticine. When you try to screw in the tie-down bolts, the foot rotates and the wire leg twists inside the clay instead of tightening the nut.
Don't animate on a wobbly table.
I need to concentrate on being less clumsy.
Don't wear a baggy sweater when animating. Loose sleeves cause havoc.
I need a better set up, because currently I have to animate side-ways on, and I have to reach over the camera to adjust the puppets. I found out how impossible it is to line up a camera again after knocking it mid animation.
I need a better camera.
I need an angle poise lamp which doesn't gradually droop as it warms up.
I might need to find a way to keep the light level constant. Dimmer switch and a lux meter maybe?

I can't wait to animate something that isn't made of plasticine. I enjoy working with it, but it has so many bad points, mainly to do with maintainence of puppets. Plasticine gets dirty, hairs seem to be magnetically drawn to it's surface, the colour from the mouths transfers to the body and you have to scrape it off and smooth it over, bits drop off under the hot lights and it's impossible to get them back in the same place, the armature wire comes to the surface if you aren't careful, some brands are rock hard and refuse to bend, other brands go too squishy under hot lights, you catch the puppet with a fingernail and it takes five minutes to repair the surface.

I can't wait to animate something woolly!

The camcorder had to go back...

2008-03-27T17:20:00.000-07:00

Boo hoo. The camcorder had to go back. I'd go so excited by finding a 3CCD camera at such a low price, that I forgot to check one vital feature - was it possible to get live DV streamed from the camcorder to my laptop. With most of the similar models of panasonic DVD camcorder it is possible. With the one I bought it wasn't. It had to go back to the shop, so I'm still using my cheap and cheerful chinese webcam for the forseeable future.

I'm still on the look out for a 3CCD panasonic camcorder, but I'm going to go with miniDV format because apparently the picture is better, although this might be down to the compression used for the recording format, which I don't think matters if you are using it to transfer live DV. The other advantage is that most of them have a webcam function (live DV out). Problem is, good 3CCD miniDV panasonic camcorders are pretty expensive (by my standards), even secondhand. I am going to be saving up for some time.

I splurged on a camcorder...

2008-03-21T13:44:00.000-07:00

I bought a camcorder today. It was a bit more expensive than I'd been planning to pay, but I can justify it to myself, I think. I'd been looking at new entry-level Panasonic Mini DV camcorders, because they are cheap but come with manual focus, exposure and white balance. The problem is, they will only ever give pictures that look like they've been shot on a budget camcorder.

Anyway, I found a reconditioned Panasonic DVD camcorder on ebay. It's a few years old, but instead of being a budget camcorder it's a higher-end home camcorder and has far better picture resolution and 3CCD (which apparently is a good thing). It was £30 more than a new entry level Panasonic, but it should last me a lot longer because I won't have to upgrade it as soon.

It arrives (along with a tripod) on Tuesday. Very exciting!

I also hope to try and shoot two more classroom based monologue animations over Easter weekend, this time with basic armatures, and.... wait for this.... MOVING ARMS!

Introduction

2008-03-19T09:17:00.000-07:00

So, I find myself aged 26 as an unemployed art graduate with Asperger's Syndrome.
What's a girl to do?

Lock myself in a dark room with a camera, a computer and a selection of puppets with the aim of teaching myself stop-motion animation up to a professional standard within a year - nothing like setting myself a challenge!

The plan is to get myself a showreel together by this time next year (this is very optimistic, but I need a target to aim for) with a view to getting onto a postgraduate professional development course in stop-motion animation, followed by a career in prop and puppet making (fingers crossed) and freelance stop-motion animation. That's the plan anyway - not that any of my previous plans have ever worked out.

Why stop-motion animation? Well my wide range of skills and talents include 2D and 3D art and design, puppet making, basic metalwork, creative writing, digital graphics editing, basic engineering and problem solving. Add to that my abnormally long attention span, general perfectionism and obsessive attention to detail, and in theory you have a natural stop-motion animator.

I've been designing and making creatures for a long time, usually hand-crocheted stuffed monsters, but also in modelling clay and other materials, so it seemed a logical next step to give my creations life and personality through stop-motion animation.

I loved watching stop-motion animations as a child, from Bagpuss and Postman Pat on TV to films like The Fool Of The World And The Flying Ship and Harryhausen's great creations (although I had no idea that any of these were filmed in stop-motion at the time). My passion for stop-motion continued with the work of Aardman Animations and films like Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride, along with the occassional animated shorts that would be shown on TV. Recently the fire has been fuelled by my re-discovery of 1970s British kids show The Clangers.

I finished post-production on my first animated short yesterday. I enjoyed making it so much and got so involved in the process that I shot the entire thing in one night, and didn't get to sleep til 8am. It was the first time in my life that I had the feeling that this is what I'm supposed to do.

This blog (along with my youtube channel www.youtube.com/woollymonster) will be my way of recording how the plan is going. Wish me luck.

Here is my first ever piece of stop-motion animation, 'What I Did At The Weekend', made from scratch in the spare bedroom. It was inspired by my Mum who teaches six and seven year olds, and the anecdotes she comes home with.

The monster is made of green Newplast and very cheap Tallon Fun Plastic, and was about 5" tall. The mouths (there were 11 of them) are made of black and white card and Fun Plastic. The eyes are plastic beads with painted pupils. The set was knocked together out of coloured paper, foam letters, a sheet of cork, a carpet tile, some g-clamps and lots and lots of White Tack (like blu-tack but white, obviously).

From the initial idea and puppet making through to post-production, the short took less than 3 days to make. Shooting itself took about 8 hours straight.

It was shot at 24 frames per second (with the mouth moving on 2s) with a very cheap generic 2 megapixel webcam and all FREE software. I used Monkey Jam frame-grabber software. The sound was edited in Wave Pad. The lip-syncing was worked out with JLipSync then put onto a more detailed dope sheet. Everything was edited together in Movie Maker.

My next short 'The Invasion Is Coming' is currently in pre-production.