Making a Stop Motion Puppet (Part 2): De-molding and Casting

This is a follow-up post to THIS POST.

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....

A New Animation & VFX Reel!

Check it out. I cut a new reel:



Thanks to Matt Schwartz for helping me out with the audio on the title card.

Bear Animation Walk-Through

I spent the other night working on some traditional 2D animation for use in a music video treatment. The goal was to create a simple loop of bears walking inspired by the Drunken Pink Elephant scene in Dumbo. Here's what I put out (watch in HD):



A here's how I put it together:

With that amazing Disney sequence in mind, I wanted to go as traditional as possible and get out the light board and pencils and actually do it by hand. So, I started by getting a quick bear design from the talented Mr. Tyler Jensen.

Now, I think in motion paths first because I learned animation in After Effects, so I began by planning out the basic motion of what I wanted--rather than figuring it out as I went. I knew I wanted it to be a 12 frame loop because that was the length of a beat in the song I was originally drawing to. So I drew this in pencil:


Then, using that sketch as a guide for where to put my bear over the 12 frames, I got out the lightboard and roughed out bears in varying states of leaping, stretching, and landing in pencil.


Then, when I was happy with how each of the 12 little bears looked, I used the lightboard and a black felt-tipped pen to ink them all clean-like:

Then, I scanned each of them into photoshop, removed their backgrounds and put them all in sequential layers in a photoshop file, which looked like this:
I took this file and imported it into After effects where I applied some color and a grungy texture from a Google image search. Then I looped him, duplicated him with different colors, and staggered the timing so that they jumped over eachother. I also "panned" the digital camera at the same speed they were moving forward so they remained in the center of the screen.

If I were to do this for real, I would probably do twice as many frames and up the framerate because the motion is quick enough that 12 frames a second looks too choppy. Next time...