Action!

For the past week I was on full animating mode. I start to work with my set and my puppet, learning how to light and compose my shot along the way. I have encountered a few problems with lighting, either I cannot set it up right, too much or too little light and moreover, my set burned...Fortunately it's a part that is no longer needed but this give me a good lesson in considering a more suitable (and non-flammable) material to built my set with. 

I have gotten used to the routine in the puppet room starting with setting up my set, positioning the character, then setting up the IOTA rig and the camera and ending with getting the lights right. In addition to this week I got a good advice to use an app call the IOD Calc Jnr which helps to calculate the IO for my S3D, ensuring that I will get the appropriate difference between my left and right eye that I won't create eyes strain for the audience.

Though things are finally moving, with the end of the term approaching, I am quite certain that I would not be able to finish the film as I have planned on my storyboard, regardless of how much I wanted to. It was a necessity to scrapped away some shots such as my panning shot as I yet learn how to move the camera right and also with my projection on to the hills scene is not working out because the projector flickered which is unsuitable to shoot S3D (the one camera cha-cha technique needs the scene to stay exactly the same which shooting each eye). 

Nevertheless, I am still determine to produce a good work, just only that plan has changed and I will now concentrate more on experimenting with S3D. What I have in mind is to just animate different scenes and playing with the depth of S3D. Eventually by next week I should have enough footage to create a short. So far this is the fruit of my labour.

Moving Forward

This week it is all about finishing the set, with that has been said I do still need one element in order to call the set making process complete-I still need to make a nice couch for my little guy. But by far I have finished the hills for both of my scene, the steel flowers blooming scene and the colorful hills scene. The hills are made of Styrofoam cut with heated wire foam cutter which is a very awesome equipment to create the jaggety, rocky look, I then finished up the texture with gesso to smooth out the foam beady texture. As for the hills for the steel flowers they are just the olden days paper mache. 

The steel aluminum flowers.

The heated foam wire cutter.

The most exciting news of this week is that I finally get to try out the Dragon IOTA rig, thanks to Sean Arden from the Emily Carr S3D Centre. I set up my scene and start practicing lighting, I set up the lights as if there's a sunshine streaming in, with a huge mistake of having two shadows...one point needed to be corrected there. And for the second scene I wanted to create a night ambient, to achieve that I use two light sources: one yellow one from the window and a flood light with blue filter from far away. 

Because I'm not quite familiar and confident in setting up the IOTA rig just yet I didn't try the S3D in other angles apart from the simple frontal shot. But I do want to practice on shooting from different angle anyway so I went ahead, plus I experiment a bit more with light by bouncing the light from the wall through the window to create a chilling icy scifi look. 

The latest experiment I did this week is some more light experiment, in which inspired by Chantal , using projection on the foam hills I did. The projection is create with videos of flowing water I took with added effects on AE, I then projected it frame by frame while animating my set.

It's trippy!

The Right One

Finally the product from my work with the plaster mold is finally out...but it's not what I will be using. Camrose advised me to use silicone rubber for the puppet as it would dry without any problem from my mold (as my plaster did not dry properly). Though not quite a success, I will surely try out more plaster mold puppets as the texture and the appearance can create many interesting results. 

Because the two puppets did not work, I ended up making a third one from sponge and painted with rubber latex. This time the puppet turned out perfect for his purpose; he's flexible, his skin is rubbery and he's light. As the puppet is now done I am moving to set making and simultaneously testing out lighting and convergence for my S3D.

Storyboard (part 2)

Finally I have finished my storyboard! And now I am organizing all the materials that I would need to make each scene. Though frankly, I doubt if I will have the complete film due to time constraint, we have another four weeks to work on this project and at the moment just figuring out how to make a proper puppet alone is quite time consuming. 

At least part two to my little story is done. 

My plan for this weekend is to get as much concept arts done as possible (or needed, at least for me to have a clear visual of what I want). Concept arts is also important for other people to understand what it is I'm trying to do as I do need advice and assistant. 

I have managed to finished the first two memory sequences, in which the rain scene would be mostly compositing in AE and not so much a real S3D shoot; combining just loop stop motion for the rain. 

Another scene is the blooming flower scene, in which I'm making the set out of paper pulp and the flowers out of wire frame and aluminium foil. I have already test out the perspective and shooting in S3D. I'm quite happy with the result, especially that I did the S3D animation without the Dragon Rig (the motor was not working properly), Stephen showed me how to shoot left and right exposure manually in Dragon Frame. 

And here's a scene of him in his loneliness:

Also my effort in making a plaster mold is finally going to pay off! Hopefully...The initial intention in making a rubber latex puppet with expanding foam interior is scrapped away because the arms and legs are just too thin for the material to work. In the end Camrose advice me to make him out of silicone instead, though I am a little scared that the puppet will be too heavy in the head. plus the material is shiny and might not give the appearance I aim for. My plan B for the puppet is to make Martin's Foam Sandwich Method, positioning a wire amature between two sponge and carefully snip around to get the shape that I want and then brush on rubber latex for the skin. This method is more likely to be possible. Stay-tuned and how the little guy will turn out to be! 

Storyboard (part 1)

Originally, I have this idea of making the little guy a chronophobic character, afraid of the passing of time, stuck with his past of beautiful memories and unable to move on to the future.

I really want to make the idea work and able to deliver a narrative driven animation that is infused with experimental techniques. That posed a lot of challenge in terms of coming up with the actual storyboard. So far this is what I have:

Also there are two concept arts that I did in S3D to get some visual idea of how thee scene will came out.

And at this moment I am stuck. Coming up with how the story will progress is actually harder for me than actually making the animation happen, because once I know what I have to do I know I will try to find a way to make it happen. However, if there's nothing to begin with there's no way to move on. 

Initially, I thought that coming up with abstract images would be easy and would easily fit with my memories sequences. Apparently to make random elements play out together in a logical sense is rather difficult. I will have to re-write my storyboard in either as a simple narrative or go full on experimental; my original plan is not going to work due to time constraint.

A Bit More Progress

Hoorah, I finally have time to actually locked myself up in one of the puppet rooms at ECUAD to work on some tests with my puppet and scene set up. The puppet that I used for this test is the foam puppet from the vacuum form mold, he is extremely flexible which there is a pro and con to this quality. It's great to make the fluid movement that I want this character to have but at the same time he is kind of hard to work with as the wire amature inside is not stiff enough to handle the weight of the entire puppet, also the nature of this material is that he has a "skin" and it tends to fall off quite easily. This foam puppet might work better if the amature inside is stronger.

The set is a surreal world with odd objects inhabiting the area. I create this test set up with S3D in mind, composing the scene to have a well define foreground and background. Another area I practiced in is camera movement, as I know for certain that it is one of my weak points in animation-having mainly just static shots...dull. I definitely need a camera rig for a smooth camera movements because I found out that animating several objects at once as well as moving the camera is not an easy task (not that there's any easy and sweet animating technique anyway).

One last test that I did is compositing, combining some flash animation with the stop motion that I did. Lighting is the most important element here to make everything blends together harmoniously in which apart from real lighting, AE lights do play a big part.

Here are the results

Progress

This week progress has been slow due to my underestimation of how long the puppet making process is. But I have accomplished to make a plaster mold out of my prototype and now waiting for the plaster to dry so I can move on to the next step of injecting rubber latex into the mold. 

Plaster.

He's in there.

I also try out the vacuum form mold. I laid out a wire amature inside in hope that I can move the puppet after filling the mold with expanding foam. 

Weighing down the backing of the mold while the foam is expanding.

The result came out interesting. There are some defects such as his hands and feet are not completely filled and the exterior skin of the foam seem to be very easily peel off. This is another type of puppet and I'm not too sure how will or can use him in my film but his does have interesting texture and extremely flexible to move.

Lastly it's time to actually animate. In this test I use a mock up puppet as I play with some lighting and practice on this little guy very fluid movement, trying to capture his timid personality. 

 

The set up.

And here is the test with a clay mock up puppet. I really try to play with the light set up this time and also camera movement (cheated by moving the stage instead, haha). Overall from this test I know that the amature for the puppet works well and the aesthetic, which is Czech animation influenced, really appeals to me.