From the Dungeon - Test Door and Wall pt.1

Whew! I finally got a chance to make to my way to the surface, at least that's the way it feels. Let me catch my breath and see what's been brewing.



Hello and greetings everyone. It has been very quiet from the set design side for a while so I thought I would give everyone a little sneak peek of what I have been slaving away at. If it is not apparent yet, this film is going to be great in every respect. We are pulling out all the stops and trying to push the envelope as far as possible, and that goes double for the animator and myself. I can't tell you how many times I have built something for this film and then instantly was unsatisfied only to redo it.

"Enough rambling, get to the bloody point!" Okay I will, I mean that's why you are here right? I have decided to break this up into several parts so it will be easier to digest. This is a test of the wall and the doors in the scale we will be using. I may actually end up incorporating it into the final set, but that remains to be determined.

Here the doors are measured and will be removed from the immediate wall surrounding them. I put a marker next to it give an idea for size, also I just forgot to get it out of the picture.










I have removed the area where the doors will be placed. The next step is to paint the underlying coat before the wood trim pieces can be affixed to the wall. And the first step to painting is primer. If you are wondering what that white area is, I left a small corner where I held the wall unpainted because it will be covered up and never seen.










This floor is huge and it's only a fraction of the final size! I have left half of it undone to allow the other to dry and set up before I finish, and I personally needed a break from laying the floor.










This lovely picture is the first layers of paint on the wall. I wanted to give it more of a hand painted and worn look. This wall will need several more coats before it will be ready. If you look closely, you will see some of the wood trim pieces next to it.









Now I know what you're saying, "Brian what are these pictures? They make no sense and I don't really see anything cool here." Well, you've got some nerve mister. I mean, I know. Welcome to the world of set design, here you do a lot of smaller parts and then bring them all together. That's why this is just the first part, come back for the rest that's when it starts to get interesting. I am going to walk through and show how it all starts to come together.

I am going to post the next one in a few days. Thanks for reading!
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Outstanding Memorial Day Tribute Film!

Hi Folks,

If you haven't seen this little film yet, then you need to! It's called Reveille, and it's spread like wildfire all over the internet. It has been viewed over 4 million times!

With Memorial Day weekend coming up, this is a great reminder of why we're proud of our servicemen and women. If you or anyone you know has served in the military, you'll truly appreciate this.

Check out the film on youtube, google video, or film4vets.com.

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Director's Journal #3

Hi all,

We're moving into the exciting part of the animation. PRODUCTION! Hallelujah! Well, we're more like in a hybrid of pre-production and production. Interesting thing, really.

We finished filming and cutting the teaser, it's moved over to the audio guys for music and foley and we can't wait to see what they can come up with! We should be able to debut it soon all over the net. Now we're setting up for shooting in the coming week on the first scene of the film. It takes place inside the main foyer of the house and it's going to look great! We will be demonstrating an indepth look at the construction of the set and give you guys the first look at the inside of the house for "Moving Day"! Read more!

Camera Dolly

Well I made this dolly using plans found at:

http://www.stopmotionworks.com/articles/stopmocamdolly.htm

the plans are great, and the rig works. It will be the first of many so I will be calling this one the prototype. Its not perfect and took a couple trips to the hardware store to complete hopefully it will do what its supposed to.


oh I am Jared by the way, glad to be onboard and you may not be able to find a more passionate, hard worker than myself. Lets make some movies! Read more!

Director Journal #2

Time for another journal folks!

Well, we are definitely moving onwards and upwards! We're just about done with the teaser and it is looking good! I can't wait until we can show the world! We're expecting a great response from it.

One of the unsung heroes and behind the scenes gems is the rigger for the film, Jared Kauffroath. He has just completed our first track and dolly for "Moving Day." It's basically a souped up dolly that has the ability to completely control your track so you can move the camera in and out for effect frame by frame. We're going to make a post on the making of it here pretty soon so look for that!

We would also like to welcome a few others to our team. Our newest animator, Scott Collins will be helping with the teasers, trailers and final film. Also, Scott Petrie will be another behind the scenes gem working on all of our professional armatures.

We expect great things and if not, it's curtains! JK... Read more!

Director now on Twitter!

Check me out on Twitter. You can see daily what I do on the animation!

http://twitter.com/gulaboy Read more!

Bunny Slippers

These babies are ready to be attached to a character, are fully animatable, and were handmade. Want to see how?

Stop motion is a very unique form of animation. In 3D animation, a character is typically "anchored" by his hips and animated from there. In 2D animation, you simply draw the character excactly where you want them. In stop-motion, however, the character needs to be very securely anchored to the set piece in order to animate tiny movements without the whole character falling down or moving. Anyone who has ever played with action figures or toys knows how hard it is to balance a toy on his feet... one simple bump and he falls over!

That's why it's crucial to have these characters very tightly secured to the floor. In fact, we bolt them to the set with each step they take!

That being said, I need to design a pair of bunny slippers for Chris to wear on his feet. And that's just the exterior... the interior needs to have a 1/4" bolt hidden somewhere that I can use to bolt him to the set. Let's get started!

Here is a simple piece of wood that I have marked to the appropriate thickeness. This will serve as the bottom plate of the feet.

It is always a good idea to make duplicate puppets (that's what you call a stop-motion character) of each character in the animation. That way, if something happens to the character in the middle of a scene (i.e. his hand breaks or something) you can swap them out on the fly and no one notices :-)

For Chris, I will be making four duplicate puppets. That's eight pairs of shoes. That's 16 bunny ears!! To make sure they are all exactly the same, I made a template of the shoe shape:

Now I sand down the sides to make them less jagged....

Now it's time to drill the hole for the bolt to go through. I mark them all ahead of time and drill it out. The diameter of the hole is slightly larger than the actual bolt itself (1/4", remember?) so that the bolt can slide in and out easily.

Finished!

As Chris takes a step, I want the bunny ears to flop up and down. With stop-motion, you want to have complete control over anything that is going to move. So I will be putting some annealed steel wire into the ears to hold them exactly where I want them. Here I am marking where the ears are going to end up and where the wires should stick out of the wood to match up with them.

There's a small step that isn't shown here, but it isn't really anything special. I tapped a small nail into the wood where the wires should be to make a little hole to put them into. Then I dabbed a little Gorilla Glue into the holes and stuck the wire in there to secure them. I also Gorilla Glued the 1/4" nuts over the holes I just drilled. Here is the finished product:

Notice in the background the bolts with the wingnuts on them (to the left of the picture). These are called tie-downs. The bolt is screwed into the nut (on the foot) from under the set. When you tighten the wingnut up, the character is really bolted down tight!

Here, I am putting one of the tie-downs into the nut to prevent anything from getting into the threads of the nut. You'll see why in a minute...

This stuff is called epoxy putty. It is stop-motion character designer's best friend!!

There are plenty of different types of epoxy putty and they all have a different cost. One of my secrets is that you can just buy the cheapest one. I have tried them all and have never seen a noticable difference in strength, so you might as well go with the cheapest.

Here's how epoxy putty works:

You slice off a piece of it, knead it together in your fingers until the two colors become one (see the black and gray in the piece in my hands below?), then mold it into the shape you want. Within five minutes, the stuff becomes hard as rock! This particular brand goes off in about two minutes, so I really have to work fast. The tie-down prevents any epoxy putty from gumming into the nut. Make sense now?

Starting to look a bit more like slippers.

Before putting the "fur" on there, I paint on a base color of white.

They look pretty good as it is, but they need some texture to give it that fuzzy look. You can buy white pieces of felt that are about the size of a normal piece of computer paper for 40¢ at almost any art store.

Cutting the felt out to the right size...

and laying the felt over the slippers....

I glued the felt to the slippers using some generic spray glue in a can. Sticky stuff! As for the bunny ears...

I found these little guys at an arts and crafts store called Michael's. For those of you here in the states, there are probably several Michael's in your home town. They're everywhere!

And viola! They are looking pretty close to what I had in mind.

After adding the eyes and noses from the miniature bunnies I bought at Michael's, they are really coming together!

Here's another angle...

And here they are!

I plan on attaching a piece of white fuzz to the back of the slipper for a little fluffy tail, but I'll have to experiment with that at a later time.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more updates coming soon!

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