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