Grey Heights Guesthouse

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!

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...

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!

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!

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

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

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!