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.