Thursday

Mime Project


For the next part of our first university project we had to animate a mimed seen with a basic armature frame.
I reused an armature which I bought in first year so  all I had to make were hands, hard chest piece to help with animation and a head. 

To make the hands I just used a basic technique as we were getting marked on animation and not puppet build. To make the hand i first twisted some strands of wire to make basic hand shape 




I then added some brass tubing to wrist and glued it on with some epoxy resin so as I could attach it to my armature


Then using flesh coloured funky foam I traced around my wire hand


I cut out the funky foam and sandwiched the wire hand in between the two halfs


Lastly I cleaned up the hand with small nail scissors and repeated process for the other hand



To make the body and inner core of the head I used balsa wood. I glued strips of balsa together with gorilla glue and once dry I sanded it into the desired shape







I made the head out of sculpy with a balsa wood core. I used two beads for the eyes and made the hair, eye brows and mustache out of plasticine. It was a really basic head and didn't need to consider much such as mouths as it was mime and no lip sync was involved.


here is some picture of the final puppet.







This is a video of my Final Animated Mime Sequence



If this does not work here is the link to it on my youtube page

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOMGHOxGyyE










Lip sync Project

For our first project of the year in university we were asked to take a sound clip and animate a lip sync. We had to make a simple blob puppet with sausage style mouths and animate lip sync only portraying the emotion of the character through facial expression.

I made my puppet from green plasticine


I began by breaking plasticine apart into smaller easy to manage pieces



I then combined these pieces to form the main body for the puppet


I then added two beads for eyes



From there I sculpted the brow to add more expression when animating


I tried a variety of different colours for the mouth. Some colours such as green didn't stand out enough while others were too overpowering. I finally decided on pink as it was clear to see and complemented the colour of the puppet.




Once I decided on the colour of the mouths I went ahead and made all the mouths I needed for the lip sync. I first broke down the voice clip. I then drew out all the mouths I felt I needed and in premiere I synced it with the sound to see if the mouths worked. Once I was happy with how it looked I made the mouths from plasticine.


Finally I cleaned up my puppet and added pupils to the eyes. I also twisted some thick wire and glued it to a wooden base, I then pushed this into the bottom of the puppet to stop it moving as much while I animated .



Here is the Video of my Final Animated Lip Sync


If this isnt working properly or is not clear here is a link to a version on my youtube account
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xV4XS73zSo

Wednesday

The First of Some Final Steps

My Name is Stephen Shelly. I am a 3rd year student currently studying Stop Motion Animation In the Atrium at the University of Glamorgan Wales. This Blog will be a way to show the work I will (hopefully) complete throughout my final year of university mainly focusing on my final major project which will be a short stop motion animated film but also a few other related things along the way. In this blog I will post my ideas and how they develop over time, my process for character builds and sets and if all goes well a final year film i'm proud of at the end. So feel free to follow my blog and leave your comments if you wish I will be planning to update this at least once a week (always good to start positive anyway!) but for now i need to work on stuff to get up here so goodbye!