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....

The Video is Complete!

So, I've posted almost nothing in over a month because my life had been eaten up by a single project: animating the music video for "Chocolate" by (Latin American Grammy winners) Jesse & Joy. Here it is:

Jesse & Joy- "Chocolate" from Carlos Lopez Estrada on Vimeo.

The video was directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada, for London Alley Entertainment, and funded by Warner Music Mexico. It took us about three weeks of preproduction and a month of shooting. It is made up of 2,900 still photographs of custom made cookies, cookie crumbs, salt, and other edible goodies. By that, I mean there are no digital effects; we actually sat, lit, and slowly moved physical objects around the old fashioned way, with the help of Dragon Stop Motion. We were working our asses off. Want to see? Here's a behind-the-scenes:

Behind the Scenes of "Chocolate" from Carlos Lopez Estrada on Vimeo.

So watch it. Enjoy it. And please send it to your friends for Digg submissions, StumbleUpon thumbs ups, and other means of internet validation. Maybe I'll actually get the big bucks for future projects once this gets some--and I hate to use this term, but--viral success.

UPDATE:

We've also now been graciously linked by the following blogs:

The Dragon Stop-Motion Website Blog

Video Static

Cartoon Brew

Animation Magazine dot EU

Best of Animation/Stop Motion Vimeo Channel

Everything Animated Vimeo Channel

And for you Espanol speakers out there:

Hecho en Mexico

Thanks to everyone that has helped spread the word!

Stop Motion!

We've just finished week one of the music video for Jesse and Joy's song, "Chocolate." It's a slow going process with lots and lots of still photos of cookies. But we've been making some really cool looking footage. Here is a sample:



That is a boat made of cookies with waves made of clay rubbed in olive oil. I pre-animated a reference video to overlay in Dragon Stop Motion for these shots. It looked like this:



And here are a couple of pictures of me and fellow animator, Nate Miller, hard at work making it happen:





We've got 2+ more weeks of this. Lots more to come!

Side Project #2: Stop Motion Camera Dolly!

Dolly!

I spent this week designing and building a camera dolly for stop-motion camera moves. I have a stop motion music video idea a-brewin', and I knew I was going to need something for dolly shots. It seems that the demand isn't high enough for any one company to make premade stop motion dollies. But I had seen a design that I liked by one Brady Whitcomb that a google search turned up and knew I could fashion something like it myself. His was controlled by a long threaded rod that was spun at one end to scoot along his dolly platform. However, I had no idea how to cut all the aluminum that he had used. So I sat down and thought about how I could achieve the same control with wood and PVC pipe because I knew how to cut and screw those substances.

After a lot of head scratching and procrastinating I drew this last tuesday:


I then hitched a ride with E.T. Hazzard to Home Depot in Oakland to stock up on some hardwares. I bounced my ideas off of him over the almost two hours we spent walking around and grabbing random things. He took my one-pully idea and proposed using two to avoid the wire catching on itself. He also cut the angles and the metal for the handle. He's really a handygod among handymen.

Without a car, it took me the rest of the week to buy some skateboard wheels--Thank you, 510 on Telegraph--and to take a few more trips to hardware stores--thank you AC transit--as I figured out I had not gotten everything that I needed the first time. It's really a miracle that I yesterday I was able to drill, screw, and sand my way into making this little doozy (all for under $80):

It's controlled by a crank in the center of the board that when spun, slides the dolly along a steel wire down the track. The spitfire sticker came with the wheels. Hella custom rig, yo.

I put a protracter on the bottom so that I can turn the handle by a standard degree each shot and plan out speed ramps to and from a stop.


I have E.T. to thank for this pully design. I was originally thinking one pully with the steel wire making a full rotation around it, but this works a lot smoother and the wire doesn't have to touch itself. Plus it looks really classy.

And here is my very first dolly shot ever. Made with the help of my screen writing buddy Austin Zumbro. Keep in mind this is shot with an old point and shoot still digital and I had yet to put the protracter in and was just eyeballin' it for the rotation. Expect more (smoother) test shots in the coming week.

But although I am very proud of my dolly, that shot is kinda boring. So instead of leaving you with that, I'll leave you with an old bit of stop motion that me and Austin made a couple summers ago. It's silly:

And a couple doodles from the week:

Until next monday...