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...