Animation Artefact - Progress!

As I realise I don't have much time to create a full animation I have really been cracking on with this part of the module and after speaking to Richard about my idea he fully supports it and thinks it's simple yet effective, which is great news for me. So, with that comment I carried on planning my animation and I have began by drawing designs for baby Jack, below are all of my sketches and plans.

FINAL DESIGN I LIKED

I thought it would be really fun to look at character design with plasticine and actually just made different faces with Newplast to experiment and it went really well! I thought it would be a fun activity to practice sculpting with the material as well have it as a material consideration as I had originally planned to use a felt puppet for this animation. Although, after playing around with plasticine I actually think it could work better as I am trying to make this animation as tactile as possible and when taking photos of my model you can really see the details and the errors, which just makes it even more charming and possibly more charming than felt!

I liked this face shape the best, however I felt the eyes were a little creepy and it reminded me of Coraline! So I decided to make them smaller and put a rough body onto it so that I could get a concept model before making the final thing.

More images of my concept model.

I really love how this has turned out and I think it really captures the handmade feel of stop-motion puppets! I don't want to overcomplicate my puppet as the plasticine can get very gooey when under lights and handling him so I feel like simple hands and feet like the ones above will work better and I can shape them back to as they are here quickly and effortlessly.

I also did some little animation tests to see how he would move and the clip is below.



Baby Testing - Stop Motion from Stacy Straub on Vimeo.














This little test took no time at all and I did it using my iPad at home, however it has helped me decide that I definitely want to use plasticine for this animation! My next steps are to create a wire armature to put inside the plasticine and it was hard the move the head of this character very much as I felt it was going to break off. I also need to design the little soft toy and iPad props used in the animation.