Ultimate Image

As part of our business module at Uni we had to create an ultimate image to represent ourselves and our work. The image had to be an A4 image with no text the where the image should be enough.

In some of the examples we were shown of previous years students, some people had created posters for their Final Film. I decided I would first start out by trying this myself.

I looked up examples of other stop motion posters to start

Because my puppet and set builds were not finished I just drew up examples of what poster may look like but the final design would contain the actual character puppets and sets

I decided that I wanted to make my ultimate image more personal then just a movie poster so I played around with other ideas and made some quick initial tests.

I like to do stuff different each time I create some work to keep things interesting for myself and to show that i can do more then one style.

So i looked up examples of style I wanted to try . All colour and no black outline

I decided to base my idea around a timeline of my life

Here is my final Ultimate Image picture. It represents me as a person, how my love for art and animation began, what Ive done to get to where I am today and shows what I hope to achieve in the future

Making fast cast head

To make the final heads I decided to used fast cast resin. Its comes in two parts and its mixed 50:50 part A and B

The fast cast begins to cure very quickly so you have to work fast. Once the two parts were mixed I poured it into my mold where I had placed the beads for the eyes inside which I covered in vaseline so as they could be moved around the head once cured........or so I thought

one removed the head looked good but the eyes were fixed in place

I re-done the head and added more vaseline then previously to beads but ended up with the same result  

So to fix my problem and waste no more fast cast I decided to just cast head without beads so eyes were already fixed to head and just added moveable pupils instead of whole eye moving which will create the same effect in the end. The next step is to make the replacement mouths and the blinks

Casting the Head

Ive decided to make my final head for my puppet from fast cast. Fast cast is a two part polyurethane resin which is light, very strong and takes only 30 minutes to cure. To do this I first had to make a cast of my original head sculpt. I first cut out the mouth section as I will be making replacment mouths for the character. I then baked the sculpey head so it became solid.

I cut out a wooden base for the mold base

I added a metal tube to the back of the head which will be used as a pour hole for fast cast after mold is ready

I then added walls around the head

The silicone needed to be weighed out with a 5% catalyst added to make it cure

Once mixed together I added the silicone to my head sculpt. I poured it in from one corner in one fluid stream to help decrease the chances of air bubbles forming and ruining the mold

Once set i removen walls

Here is the pour hole in the back of mould

I finally cut down the back of the mold in a zig zag to help mold join back together better and removed the original sculpt the next step will be to add fast cast and begin to cast my heads

Head Sculpt

To begin my first stage of the head sculpt for my character I used super sculpey firm. I chose this as it is nice to sculpt with and holds detail well and also bakes hard which is good for when I want to make a cast of the head later

I first began by making basic head bulk out of tin foil which gives sculpey something to attach to

I added beads for eyes and marked out areas of the face

I used my plans and pictures to keep size and proportions correct

I made adjustments such as bigger beads for eyes as I went along

I created basic shape for features and hair

Once I had all the correct  sizes and proportions of the head and all its features I added the final details

Here is the final head sculpt. the next stage is to bake it and then make a silicone mould to cast the final puppet head from

Puppet Padding

After the armature was built the next step was to pad the puppet out.

To do this I used a thin foam. My character is thin so the thin foam was enough to give enough padding for when clothes were put on but not to much that it bulked out the character.  I cut strips of foam to the required size and glued it with contact adhesive .The next step will be to make the clothes for the character to wear.