I've pretty much finished up all the butcher's shop fabrication since my last post.

The puppet for Shawn is finished. I wound up changing the way I made his hands a bit. Instead of using a mold, I built up the shape using Vetwrap and then painting latex over that. It isn't quite as smooth overall, but there isn't a seam along the mold line.

The chicken's pretty much finished too. I just need to throw a few tail feathers on him, and then he should be good to go.

And here's the finished set. I'm probably gonna keep adding little props to it as I go, but overall it's done.



I've also started animating. Here's one of the finished shots.

Moldssss

I prepared the head and mouth for molding this week.

The mouth mold will be used to make replacement mouths, and the head mold will be for making plastic copies. The material I used for the molds is Oomoo 30, from Smooth-On, which is a pretty easy to use two part silicone rubber.

The mouth mold was a pretty straight forward 1-part mold.

The rest of the head needed to be a two part mold. So I casted half of it...

... And the built up the walls and sprayed it with a mold release to cast the second half.

Then I started messing around with casting plastic copies of the head.

I had some better luck with the latex hands too.

I'm still working on getting everything trimmed down and smooth, though. I tried cutting off the excess and painting over them with more latex, and they look ok. But I'd like to get them smoother still.

So I'm probably gonna see if I can smooth these out more, or I might cast a few more copies and see if I can get them to turn out any better.

And then I made some pants.

ROCKtober

I've been working on casting the latex hands for the butcher puppet.

These ones actually kind of collapsed a bit, cause I didn't let the silicone dry enough before putting the mold halves together. And the next ones I casted after this didn't have the right silicone/acrylic ratio, so they fell apart. But third times the charm... I hope...

I also started bulking up the butcher's body.

And started trimming it into shape.

I also started working on his head.

Hopefully he'll look a little less creepy with, like, pupils and stuff.



I'm also working on chicken armatures. Here are the feet for the first one.

And then, uh, a bunch of random prop stuff.

Gettin' Handsy

Last weekend I didn't have a ton of stuff done, 'cause I was at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. It was super dope, I got to meet a bunch of cool people. But I wound up spending my time wandering through crowds of poutine and strange money instead of doing thesis stuff.

Anyways, I did manage to get a handful of things done since then.

I've gotten pretty far on Shawn's armature. I made a block for the upper body to allow for replacement heads.

And then got everything pretty much together.

 

I also started working a mold for his hands, so I can cast those in silicone.

 

I've got the other halves of the molds as well, I just don't have a picture yet. So now I can start messing around with actually casting the latex.



I started putting together the basic structure for the butcher's shop set.

So now I need to put together the legs and supports. And then start setting up the walls.



I've got the metal pretty much finished for the fridge, and also have a handle on it now.

And finally, I started making labels and stuff for the cans that'll be stacked around the shop.

Yup, so now it's on too... uh... more making stuff, I guess.

Sets and Stuff

I did a couple animation tests with the armature I made last week. They aren't the most beautiful pieces of animation in the world, but now I know the armature design won't totally fall apart on me.

I did decide to increase the scale of the puppet from 10" to 12". This should help get more subtlety in the movement, and also keep the chicken puppets from being to small.

I also finished up some more character designs. First I've got the evil chicken.

I stole a bunch of design point from Rio, so hopefully he should be pretty distinguishable from the other chickens. I started messing around with chicken armatures, but so far they've all been pretty big failures. Hopefully increasing the scale should help a bit, but it'll take quite a bit of experimenting to figure something out.

I also finished the design for Charles, a character that comes in at the very end of the film.

SPOILER ALERT: He's the chickens father

I've started working on fabrication of the butcher's shop set.

I've got bunches of homasote and plywood to start making the actual set frame, but I've also started working on props and set pieces.

This will eventually be the refrigerator. I've got sheet metal I'm going to be cutting up and pasting over the poster-board shell to give it the look of a brushed stainless steel fridge.

So, uh, yeah. Stay tuned, I guess... Or not... That's cool too...

Dat Thesis

Oh, hey there. This is Joe. I'm making a movie.

I'm working on my Senior Thesis, a movie about butchers, chickens, and the afterlife. It's going to be a stop-motion short, hopefully finished by next Spring. And hopefully it won't be bad.

So, I guess I'll post some progress and stuff here to keep me all motivated and whatnot throughout the year.

Right now I've got the script nailed down and the boards pretty much finished.

I'm working with my sound guy to get this all turned into a full-fledged, super cool animatic. But in the meantime I'm trying to get right into fabrication. I've got three sets I need to make for this film. The first one I'm working on right now is the butcher's shop, where the film opens. So I've started trying to figure out proportions between the puppets and props and whatnot.

With this all figured out I can go ahead and start actually making the set and props.

I've also started making some armatures to test for the butcher puppet. All my previous puppets have used twisted wire armatures. But apparently it's all the rage to wrap wires with thread instead nowadays to keep it from weakening as fast.

I made this guy to test it out with. The actual fabrication process was pretty straightforward, so now I'll move on to actually animating it to see how it moves.

So, if all goes according to plan, by next week I should have a test animation and some props and stuff to show.