Last month I designed and animated this little spot for Arizona-based B2B marketing agency, Televerde:
The script was written by producer/director Jack Hooker, who gave me quite a lot of creative freedom with the look and feel of the ad. To create it, I drew all the elements by hand with a pen on paper (with help from a lightboard) and scanned it all in to be animated with the Puppet Pin tool in After Effects. Then sound engineer Matt Schwartz designed the sound and voiced the narration.
Check out a quick look at the process of taking all the individually drawn elements and bringing them together for one character's series of movements:
Now, it's time for the holiday break. My vacation goal: making a new and improved silicone puppet for some personal stop motion fun! Check out the latest sculpt:
This video was a complete labor of love for all the people involved. We spent 30 days locked in a house together designing, printing, cutting out and animating thousands of little pieces of cardstock in a clear display of stop motion insanity.
Carlos Lopez Estrada, working with production designer Tyler Jensen, would start us out with a storyboard with notes on timing and a loose idea of what elements would be in each shot.
This would give Carlos a guide for what to shoot during the day we shot video of the band and extras...
I would then take that footage in, effect it out in After Effects so it looked all old and scratchy, rendered it out at 12 frames per second and wrote a couple Automator scripts that would take the files that After Effects spit out and resize and print them all for me.
While I was doing this, Tyler's art department team was busy designing in photoshop, printing on a large-format printer, and mounting all the set pieces so that they could be built in front of the camera for our DP Moonie to light and frame up the shot.
To be ready to shoot we had a pretty constant flow of wonderful friends and volunteers that helped us cut out all those individual frames and keep them organized in stacks.
While this was going on, I made some pre-animations in after effects that would tell lead animator, Charles Pieper, things like what numbered frame each character was supposed to be on and when characters should be entering or exiting to make sure everything lined up. With stop motion we dont really have time to make a mistake, so these pre animations assured that we'd get stuff right the first time.
We also didn't have the money to rent or make a stop motion dolly rig, so all the camera moves were actually us moving the entire set while the camera remained locked off. I wrote an expression in After Effects that would print out how much in millimeters we had to move the set each frame to get nice eases into and out of camera moves. That preanimation looked like this:
The really tricky part for this shot was timing the camera move so that she reached out and grabbed the ticket right as the ticket booth got to her. It took some pretty precise coordination, but we ended up getting it.
With all those elements ready to go, we then were able to shoot about ten seconds (120 individual photographs) a day. We captured with Dragon Stop Motion, which allowed us superimpose the preanimation that I made onto what we were doing live so we could be absolutely sure all the motion was smooth and clean.
I then took the footage we shot, cleaned up what needed cleaning, and strung it all together in After Effects. The final piece to be added was all the smoke and magic effects. For this, I took what we had already shot, used it as an overlay video, and shot cotton balls moving around on black cloth, which I used the luma value as an alpha channel in After Effects to put into the shot. Like this:
Now imagine doing this entire process for 30 days straight. We had to stagger all the work so that as we were shooting one scene, art department would be building the next scene and I'd be animating the scene after that. Each shot had a unique set-up to execute what was needed for the story, but for the most part this was how it all went:
And if pictures aren't really your thing, check out this silly behind-the-scenes video we made:
If you liked this video, check out the last stop motion video we did for Jesse & Joy HERE.
After rubbing a little Vaseline onto the finished half of the mold as a release agent, I built another clay wall and repeated the process.
In the morning, I peeled off the clay around the outside and put it back in the back in the bag to use it again later. (Recycle, Reduce, Reuse!)
Using a couple screwdrivers and some elbow grease, I pryed two halves apart. The back half came of all nice and clean, but the sculpt stuck really hard into the front half. I ended up having to go at the orginal sculpt with a hammer and chisel to get it out of the front. Here is what it looked like after like 10 minutes of chiseling:
I ended up not being careful enough in my chiseling and made a few pretty gnarly scratches on the mold. There were also a couple bubble spots. But otherwise it came out pretty nice for a first try:
I'm using Smooth-On's Dragon Skin silicone as a casting material, with an armature wire skeleton. Because the Dragon skin is pretty pricey, I wanted to do a quick test to try it out. So I filled just the hand with silicone and used the armature from the original sculpt that had been chiseled clean.
I was lazy and added the color once it was already in the hand, so I didn't mix it very well and it ended up looking like this:
But that was fine to do a little test animation with some Helping Hand parts using my webcam. It's pretty quick, so you might have to watch it a couple times:
Excited that it was so easy and fun to use, I went on to doing the whole puppet. First I applied a thin layer of colored silicone to the entire mold:
Then added another few layers...
Then made a new armature based on how the silicone fit in there. I went with thicker armature wire and used some coper tubing around the leg bones because I was worried he would be too heavy to stand on his own. Then I used some plumbers epoxy to stick it all in place:
Also, because I knew that his fat old stomach would be incredibly heavy if it was solid, I cut up some kitchen sponges and painted them with a layer of silicone to use as flexible filling:
I then put the armature in one half and did a quick pass of silicone over it to make sure it really stuck in there with no slipping.
Then I put the stomach sponges on, poured in way too much silicone and put the halves together. What came out was this:
And after a quick trim of the extra stuff, I had a little guy!
There are some pretty obvious problems with the quality of the mold. Mostly I was too rough getting the original sculpt out of the front half, but I also didn't put enough silicone into the feet, and one of the hands. I also need to work on minimizing the size of the seams, which a cleaner mold would probably help with. Overall, if I was using this guy for a short film, I'd want to start from scratch from all I learned on this first go. But for a first try, I'm pretty stoked. Now I'm going to give him some eyes, a moustache, and a little costume, and then I'll make some test animations. I'll post them as I've got 'em....
My current personal project between jobs is making a silicon puppet with a wire armature to use in side projects and to get some more practice in character animation. I am sort of figuring it out as I go along, and will record the process here in a few installments as I finish them.
I'm going for a character that has long skinny limbs and a sort of Danny DeVito-esk torso. I was thinking for the type of animation I'm going for, I want him to have replaceable eyes on top of his head, like a frog, and a large mustache that will act as an expressive mouth. I imagine him ending up a little like the guy I made HERE.
First, I did a little sketch of the proportions that I wanted, and then used some armature wire and plumbers epoxy to build up an armature to build around. I actually made two armatures using the sketch as a template so that I'd have one to live inside the silicon version as well as the original sculpt. You can watch a quick timelapse of the sculpting process here:
I used Super Sculpy that I could then bake for molding. I feel like there are more responsive and accurate clays to use, but I grew up on and I love the feel Sculpy. The only thing I changed from the original design was the style of nose. I like the original, more bulbous nose, but thought that it would be too much trouble as far as undercuts go when it came to making a mold of it.
I then baked him, spent quite some time sanding him, and then sprayed him with a good 9 or 10 layers of Krylon Crystal Clear to smooth him all up. Here his is all smooth and shiny before I started up with the molding process:
Since that video, I added some nipples and a bellybutton to give him a little anatomical correctness. The black dotted line around the edges is there to indicate where I want the mold half to go up to to minimize the undercuts in the molding process.
To make the mold I used some UltraCal 30 to act as the actual mold material, and some water based clay to build the housing for the mold. Here he is sitting in the clay holder I made around him to pour the plaster into:
And here with the first layer of Ultracal, looking very much like Han Solo:
Then, after five more layers and a layer of burlap, here I wait for the plaster to dry:
And then, after pulling off the clay and hosing it down, here if the completed first half of the mold.
I ended up using all my Ultracal on just this first half, though. So now I am waiting for the delivery of a new tub of plaster, as well as some Smooth On Dragon Skin silicone, to start on the next step of the process.
Back in August I did the animation and most of the compositing for Carlos Lopez Estrada's music video for Gustavo Galindo's "Amor De Alta Mar." I think it turned out pretty rad considering we made it in about two weeks DURING pre production of our big Stop Motion Project for Jesse & Joy. That other video will premiere soon, but for now here's Gustavo Galindo's "Amor De Alta Mar":
To make it I looked at stock footage of birds taking off, landing, and flapping and then drew keyframes with After Effects masks. I let AE do the initial tweening then did some clean up and made little timing tweaks of different versions so it would look a little less "copy-and-paste." I then used those little pre-comps as particle layers for use with a particle emitter. Here's what all the bird versions looked like on their own:
Now a bit of rest before premiering out next big stop motion video. To wet your appetite for it, here's our last project for Jesse & Joy:
Last Month I did VFX for the music video, "Orono Park" by The Wilderness of Manitoba. Check out the video here:
The video was directed by David Altobelli, and shot by Larkin Seilpe. The 3D work was done by Director, Gabe Askew, maker a very successful Grizzly Bear fan video. I did the compositing and motion tracking to place the band and the 3D supplemental footage on the miniature made by talented production designer Jason Kisvarday. You can see a little behind-the-scenes footage from the miniature shoot day here:
To make up for the fact that I'd been doing to much money-making jobs and not enough stuff just for funsies, I'm doing some character design for a stop motion short I might eventually get around to. Check out this little guy.
And some making-of photos:
I think I'm going to make a little bathrobe and some slippers for him to wear...
Last month I did some VFX supervision for the San Francisco branch of a great PR company, LauchSquad. Check out the commercial here:
The client was the online custom men's clothing company J. Hilburn and the commercial was directed by LaunchSquad creative director, Brett Marty. I was in charge of on-set supervision, comping, tracking, and clean up, while the graphic design work was done by talented SF-based freelancer Colin Gill, and the 3D modeling was done by Pierce Templeton.
It was a fun couple weeks, and a great excuse to get out of the LA black hole and spend some time in my favorite place in the world, The Bay Area. You can see proof of this fun in a behind-the-scenes shot and cut by producer and videographer Jesse Tarnoff, who works at LaunchSquad but is the brains behind one of the only good wedding video companies I've ever seen. Check it out:
Our video for Maximum Balloon's "Groove Me" got into the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX! This is a great festival of Film and Music. If you have the chance to go, you definitely should.
Here's the link to the film lineup, where you will find our video under Music Videos:
