Jim the Janitor Returns!

This week I did a test run with Jim, and used the super cool flying rig loaned to me by fellow student Lisa Chung. It is kind of tough to get used to at first, but the more you use it the more it grows on you :). Plus rig removal is super easy!

Here is the final result: Jim heads out for a jog.

Making Underwater critters

Since the majority of my short takes place underwater, I wanted to make sure that I created a lot of hand-made elements to fill the sea as Klimtina falls to the bottom. Although I will be compositing live action effects like fog and particles with After Effects, I want to make sure that the sea environment feels like a true mixed media surrounding for the puppet because she is made of foam and sheet copper.

Rice paper is probably my new favorite thing. What a way to stretch a budget. I used it to make almost everything.

The first thing I made was some seaweed. I did this by painting rice paper with watercolor, then ripping it into strips while wet. I used a reddish orange color because I knew I would have to shoot them against green screen.

Next, I brushed on a little bit of watered down Elmer's glue and twisted them onto strips of armature wire. The watercolor allowed for a nice variety of color.

The second thing I made with rice paper was some fish. I drew lightly the shapes of fish I wanted, then colored them with oil pastels. Then I wet the rice paper and tore a frayed edge around each fish. Here is how they looked against live water footage with some particles.

The third thing I made from rice paper was a papier mache jellyfish. Cameo from my cat, stage left. He probably is plotting destruction as we speak.  

Other than rice paper, I found some artist's sponges and other textures to add to really create an underwater world that fits my puppet. More to come!

Mold-making for Stop Motion

I decided to create my main puppet for my Klimt-inspired stop motion short "Falling" out of a material called foam latex, which is poured into a mold over a wire armature. Since this was my first time fabricating with this process, I was really lucky that Justin Connolly was doing a workshop at USC on mold making and agreed to use my clay sculpt of my puppet as an example.

Here is a photo of how his mold came out. He made it by laying down the clay body (Sculpey) and building up walls around it with water-based clay. This created the negative shape for the mold, and we mixed a type of cement called Ultracal which is the material you are seeing in this photo. If you use Ultracal be sure to be in a ventilated space.

Check out Justin's blog for more info on this process.

After Justin helped me through making the mold of the body, I repeated the same process to create a mold for the puppet's head. I sculpted it and used beads to create the concave space where the eyeballs would be.

Pretty creepy-looking, huh? I kept the mouth open to allow for an animatable jaw armature.The Ultracal bonded with the beads so that they became a part of the mold. You can see the remains of my clay sculpts. If you ever make molds this way be prepared for them to be useless afterwards.

The next step was to build my armature.

Lastly, I lucked out again in my foam puppet-making adventure because I was helping out on the fabrication end of a short stop motion film being made by Shel and Justin Rasch called The Line, and Shel took an entire afternoon to help me improve my armature, teach me how to mix the latex (much like making cake) and how to pour it. Then she let me bake it in her oven for several hours until the foam had set. 

It's important to remember not to use an oven you actually eat from when baking any stop motion materials like foam latex or sculpey clay. 

I found this method of puppet making really meticulous and time-consuming, but in the end it really paid off because I was able to get the texture I wanted without having to deal with the fickleness of clay.