Armature finished... well, sort of...

OK, so the armature is pretty much done.

'Pretty much' in the sense that creating the character's head is going to be quite involved and I've not started on that yet - technical challenges there will be getting the eyes and eyelids moveable so the character can look around and blink and replacement mouths for speech and expressions.

For the mouths, I'm thinking at the moment to create a series of replacement mouth/face parts that I can attach magnetically. If I can create a subtly 'segmented' look to the face, this will avoid the join being an issue. Back to the doodle-board to get something that works on that front...

and the eyes? I previously mentioned glasseyes.com and have decided to go with some of these eyes in blue-grey, slightly larger than the prototype (18mm this time round) to add to the wide-eyed cutesy factor, which I hope will juxtapose nicely with the quite literal and (hopefully) convincing cockroach build and finish whilst appearing life-like.

I've found some hollow plastic balls that are 19mm, which hopefully will work well for the eyelids. I've also ordered with some foam rubber strips (to be cut to length/width) and round lengths of foam rubber (to be quartered lenthways), which I plan to use to make soft-edged 'segments' for the body on top of some lighter upholstery foam (the latter will bulk out the basic shape). I'm also planning to use the round sections over the limbs to bulk them out and hoping they will bulge nicely over the joints. If they're glued onto the rods but not at the joints, they should also allow access to tweak the tension of the joints, too.

This will all be covered with cast, coloured latex pieces for the 'skin', finished by making and airbrushing on some thinned-down pax paint. This painting approach worked well for the prototype, and using latex colourant to provide a base colour should help the process. There's a brief explanation of pax paint here.

One of the other details I want to add to the limbs is spikey hairs. I've got a pretty simple plan for this - I'm going to try to use false eyelashes, with the lashes laid along the 'hairy' limb parts and teased into spikes with adhesive. With any luck, it'll be cheap and effective and add a nice touch of detail to the finished puppet.

Here's the armature. I've included shoulder/back pieces to attach wings - another detail that will provide the option of some some twitchy body language I think will work nicely accompanied by a chitinous rustling. I've also added a fixed joint between the two limb sections to maintain some spinal freedom of movement. The neck and abdomen sections haven't been fixed in case they need adjusting (in insect anatomy-speak, the thorax is the top/front section of the body and the abdomen is the bottom/rear section):

Next: keying and lighting tests...

A brief update...

...slow, painstaking, but satisfying progress with building the puppet armature. I bought some extra rod sections so I can afford to experiment a bit - sketching and doodling just doesn't work for me half as well as a physical mock-up. I'd have liked to have carried on and finished it last night, but have to consider neighbours with the whine of my noisy, cheapo Dremel knock off - I was also hoping to be up early to finish it to take in to uni tutorial tomorrow/later today, but couldn't sleep yet, so will see how it goes.

I also discovered a feature I wasn't aware of in CS5 After Effects - the Rotobrush tool - which looks like it could be very helpful if I have issues seperating the foreground from green background where the puppeteer will be composited in in post-production - looks very promising from this tutorial a friend shared.

Here's some pics of the armature build so far:

 Legs...

 ...more legs...

 ...and arms/torso...

Pics of the finished armature to follow very soon!

Shopping...

...is one of the constant pleasures in life (let me qualify: I don't shop constantly, but when I do, it's always a pleasure). I think it'd only get boring if I had an endless supply of money, which isn't one of my worries at the moment.

Having sold my camera and ordered my armature gear, I'm still floating on a toe-curling, post-shopping plateau. I've invested in 2 of the Animation Supplies ProPlus Armature Kits to make my single cockroach, along with their rigging system.

I'll be busy working on the puppet over the next couple of weeks and will be taking photos as I go, so excited about sharing my progress. The armature will be something like this, with a few refinements, like more articulated shoulders:

The Puppet

Funding a stop-motion film while studying a course of computer animation means I need to source most of the resources myself. I've accumulated lighting and photography gear over the the past months and will be filming with a Canon DSLR (originally a 7D, sadly downgrading to a 550D to raise some funds).

Getting the puppet character created is one of my immediate challenges, and I've decided that it'll be worthwhile to invest in the best kit I can for his 'bones', the puppet's armature. For this, I'm investing in two of the 'pro plus' armatures from animationsupplies.net, who sell very well-regarded kits at reasonable prices. Why two? That's my fault for deciding not to animate a simple human figure. The extra limbs are, appropriately, costing me an arm and a leg, but hopefully it'll be worth it, and investing in a decent armature should save a lot of time when it comes to avoiding problems with precision movement and holding poses when I'm animating.

For the body itself, I'm planning to use a 'build up' technique, where the body and features are built up on the armature 'skeleton'with foam and rubber and, in my case, finished with a combination of cast 'skin' pieces and details 'glued on' with liquid latex, along with solid cast rubber pieces for hands and feet. There's a good description of the build up technique by Richard Svensson here, which I was reassured to find uses some of the techniques I'd stumbled on or hypothesized in my own experiments.

I have created a prototype of my puppet which you can see below and more pics of on my website here. Although it served it's purpose in getting a feel for the character and a stand in for some of the pre-production work, it doesn't have the finished look I want to achieve and the aluminium wire armature it's based on isn't responsive or well made enough for the scale and scope of my animation - I'm pretty patient - it goes with the animation territory - but I have my limits...

The prototype:

Which reminds me, another challenge is the eyes. I used a pair of beautiful glass eyes from glasseyes.com in the prototype puppet, which I have to say I was pretty blown away with the quality of when I first received them, so they can expect a repeat order from me in the near future. The challenge will be setting these up so that I can move them precisely, as I'm sold on these as part of the look of the finished puppet, rather than compromising with something simpler, like beads, that lend themselves more easily to animation. Watch this space...

For starters...

Ties is the story of a downtrodden cockroach marionette and his struggle for freedom from his violent, claustrophobic partnership with 'The Puppeteer', his cruel and controlling master.

It's about a lot of things incidentally - growing up, creativity, identity, courage, domestic violence - but mostly, I just want to tell an engaging story in an original way that's at turns sad, funny, scary, exciting, uplifting and creates a real sense of empathy with the protagonist.

Along with filling in some background that led up to this point, I'll be sharing my progress over the remaining duration of the project; both the practicalities of getting it done and some of the highs, lows, hahas and boohoos that this is bound to entail. Right now, it feels very exciting and also rather daunting. Well, actually, it's mostly just daunting... but I am pretty excited about it as well.