Soil Test Sequence

So, last post I said I was working on a test sequence for Soil.  Here it is...

Obviously, the video above is not my best work.  It's really just a rough version of what's to come.  I was trying to figure out how to portray the bird, so that it'll come across as scary, like the xenomorph from the Alien franchise from which I drew inspiration.  I realize that the best way to portray a monster is to show pieces of him at a time to make him appear intimidating.  Then as time goes by, he can be revealed in all his terrifying glory.

Was this effect achieved in the video above?  I would say about 50 percent.  I think a lot of it may have to do with timing and editing.  In the final version I may also try some lighting options.  This was a nice test run.  Although not fully satisfying, I think I know where to go from here.

Below are some photos of how I built and bird for this sequence.  Like most challenges, I figure the best approach was to break it into pieces.

 Here's the close up for the bird's bust.

There are four twisted 18 gauge wires holding him up. 

The wire was bent in a ring that is under the block of clay. 

Here are the feet.  Each claw is metal wire with putty at the end.  The legs have metal tubing for bones.  They are covered by glued pieces of cloth that were painted black.  The tale has a wire mesh for some flexibility.

Nothing like duct tape to bring everything together! 

The wing also has metal tubing for bones.  It is in three sections with pieces of foam that have feathers glued on them.  The feathers were cheap.  They fall apart too much, so I may have to get them somewhere else.

Hey, as long as it works and the audience doesn't see it on screen... 

I went through three puppets just to film this test sequence.  Because of the raking motion, the ankles are definitely subject to more stress than the rest of the body.  The arms can break easily too. 

The armature design is fairly basic.  Pronged tee-nuts are the way to go for tie downs in the feet.

In other news, during the month of October AnimateClay.com had another one of their challenges.  The topic for the month was Halloween.  I can't fully explain except with the cliche that inspiration struck me early on in the month.  In a matter of one weekend, I was able to develop an original Halloween story, and figure out how to approach production in a timely manner.  In three weeks, my schedule consisted of eating, sleeping, working, reading the Bible, going to church, and animating.  That was it.  My Saturdays were completely consumed by animation.  I'm glad to say I had the full support of my parents the entire time.  The film below was completed in three weeks.

I'm honestly amazed what I was able to accomplish.  A one minute video is one thing, three minutes is insanity.  Seriously, something is wrong with me.  I'm very satisfied with how the characters, story, and animation all turned out, especially given the short time frame.  I'm so glad God allowed me to complete this film on time with such quality.  Without Him, it definitely wouldn't have been possible.

Yeah, it's because of fun little projects like this that I may get distracted from the bigger projects like Soil.  However, there are some benefits.  For one thing, I'm doing a lot of practice to help prepare for the bigger projects from an animation and film making perspective.  Solving problems on the smaller projects can also prepare me to solve problems for the bigger ones as well.  Also, having a wide variety of content, will help me get more attention on the internet which can hopefully carry over to the bigger projects.

I am working on another fun little Star Wars video.  I plan to upload it by the end of January next year.  I also hope I can start production on Soil in summer 2018.  I'll have to see what God has in store!

Thanks for reading and may God bless you!

Eleven Years of Animatng

Yep, I have been animating for eleven years now.  Before I look back, I would like to show the progress I have done with Soil so far.  One of the challenges I have been experiencing is building an armature that can stand on one leg (this is important for a character in the middle of a walk).  Fortunately, all that's required is two pieces of twisted 18 gauge wire at the ankle and foot.

Another important challenge to overcome was figuring out what piece of hardware to use for the foot for tie downs.  I decided to use tee nuts which are located at the toe area of the foot.  To allow the puppet to stand firm a bolt goes through the animation table and screws into the tee nut until it is tight.  This hardware can be seen in the later portions of my test animation compilation.

Now that these challenges have been addressed and solved I was able to do better animation with the puppets.  You can see the progression in the video.

The tests above were more focused on basic actions.  Right now I'm working on an actual test sequence where the character will do things he may end up doing in the final film.  Practice makes perfect!

Okay, now I would like to look back at the progress I have made over the past couple of years.

You know, I think I"m a Star Wars fan.

Yeah, I'm a huge Star Wars fan.  I really can't wait for The Last Jedi.  I really enjoyed working on the clip above.  Chirrut is one of my favorite characters from Rogue One.

I shall continue to improve my technique.  I got a bigger space now, so hopefully that will help me expand my sense of scope in my films for the future.

Thanks for reading and may God bless you!

Goofing Around and Some More Experiments

Something might be wrong with me.  I have trouble focusing on one project at a time.  Again, I'm still entertaining the idea that one day I can make a Star Wars fan film...

The truth is, I just wanted to take a little break from the project and think about how to solve certain problems to achieve my vision.  Fortunately, I have come up with some ideas, and I'll continue to move forward.  In other news, I had my wisdom teeth removed.

What else was I going to do with them?  Anyway, I have some more wonderful news to share!  In my last post, I mentioned I was going to work 50 hours a week building trusses in a warehouse.  Well, my persistence, college degree, and my one year of work experience have finally paid off.  I no longer build trusses.  I design them!  Yep, I now have a 40 hour a week salary day job.  Praise the Lord!  This means I will still have time to devote to my hobby!

I've been real busy due to this recent change, but I still manage to make a little progress on Soil.  The people who made kinetic sand have made a new material called kinetic rock.  It's basically a more granulated version of kinetic sand.  The video below is me pushing the limits of what you can do with this material in the stop motion medium.  There were no rigs or special effects used.

The material by itself wouldn't be very good for puppet building.  However, I have a feeling it can mix well with clay to create a rocky texture.  I'm confident I will be able to use this stuff for the rocky soil character.

Man, I keep thinking of that potential Star Wars fan film!

I have also made another Star Wars animation piece.  You see in Thanksgiving 2016, my cousin printed me a Millenium Falcon from his 3D printer.  Naturally, I wanted to animate it, but I couldn't figure out the little story I wanted to tell with it.  Then at Christmas, my oldest sister and her husband gave me a 3D doodler pen.  So, I was able to 3D draw (sculpt?) a turret and a base for my falcon to fight against.

In terms of stop motion, I think the pen would be good for special effects (like the lasers as demonstrated above).  I might be able to get some clear plastic and use it to draw water in different poses or something.  I'm sure there are other possibilities, but for now...

Thanks for reading and may God bless you!

Wayside Soil

For the past several weeks, I've been doing animation experiments for the first character that will appear in my film Soil.  As explained in my last post, the character will be made out of a mixture of clay and kinetic sand.  This will give him a unique porous texture within the context of the film.  Below is all the test animation which will give you and idea of how things turned out...

As you can tell, the character appears to crack a lot during the animation.  This works in my favor for artistic reasons because I want to give the impression that this character can barely hold himself together.  However, it cracks a little too easily, and I'm thinking of trying out a different type of clay to mix with the kinetic sand.  I also may have to mix less kinetic sand into the clay.  For this puppet, the mixture was two thirds clay and one third sand.

The armature skeleton for this puppet was very simple being made out of epoxy puddy and metal wire.  However, the epoxy "bones" didn't dry on the metal wire properly or something because they became loose on the armature during the animation process.  I haven't had that problem in previous projects.  The metal wire also fought me a lot, but fortunately I got in the habit of using a homemade surface gauge to keep track of the puppet's movement.  If you look closely, the character is able to stay standing in certain poses because I put bolts through the foot of the puppet and floor of the set which was tightened by a nut.  I plan to make a new puppet to do a new set of animation tests.  I'm going to try a variation on some of the materials to determine an ideal final product for the short.

Also, I will address the bird you see at the very end of the video.  What you see is merely an experiment on what I can do with the head of the bird.  It's a puppet with no wings or legs.

The skull and beak are made of oven baked sculpey.  The beak was painted black, and the head is covered with shredded pom poms that are glued on to it.  The eyes are simply black beads, and the "body" is a tube of fur fabric.  I'm proud of how it turned out, but it can be improved.  My approach to this character is going to be as realistic as possible.  This will not be a cute cartoony bird.  I plan to make it as intimidating and scary as possible.  The design and movements are based on the white spectacled bubul.

I have done a couple of other little experiments with this character, but I won't write about it until the compilation of tests is complete.

I really am trying to make progress on this, but I do have some bad news.  I work a job where I build trusses on an assembly line.  During the winter, I had only 30-40 hour work weeks.  Now it's 50 hours.  I'll have less time to devote to my hobby, but I'll try to march forward as best as I can while pursuing other projects.

Thanks for reading and may God bless you.

Getting Back on Track

If you couldn't tell from my previous posts, I may be a little distracted from my film Soil because I might have a slight Star Wars obsession and a longing to make a fan film at some point.

However, I can say that I'm trying to get back on track.  After doing some preliminary experiments, I have figured out what materials to use to make each soil character.  Here are some of the puppet building experiments I did for these characters.

I also did some experiments with Flex-ooh and Mad Mattr (yes, that's how they're spelled) to see if they could be used in this film or in animation in general.  I was just shopping around at Michael's one day exploring all my options...

No special effects were used in the video above because I wanted to show what you could do with just the Mad Mattr.  This substance appears to hold its shape better than kinetic sand, but it does have a very similar texture.  It can be mixed with clay, but why do that when you can just mix clay and kinetic sand?  This is not a good material for puppet building by itself.

Again, no special effects were used in the above video to demonstrate what you can do with just the material.  Flex-ooh has this really nice gooey texture to it.  It appears to absorb and reflect light very well.  It can potentially be used for special effects with lighting (like stylized fire, glowing goo, lava, etc.)  By itself, it's no good for puppet building.  The volume of the character would change too much between frames, even with a beefed up armature.  When mixed with any amount of clay it loses its unique properties.  However, the mixture would be significantly lighter than using pure clay which can be used as an advantage.

With all that data, I have made some decisions on how to start building these characters.  The wayside soil will be a mixture of clay and kinetic sand (the mixture is a consistently porous material).  The rocky soil will have "bones" with protrusions made out of oven backed clay.  His "skin and muscles) will be regular clay, or a mixture yet to be determined.  The thorny soil will be a mixture of clay and granulated sand.  The final soil will be pure clay for the sake of symbolism unless I find material that better resembles fertile soil..

These decisions are of course subject to change.  I will soon be looking at each character individually to finalize designs.  However, there is one character I have yet to mention... the bird.  To have this one stand out from the soil characters, he will not be made out of clay (at least on the surface).  He will primarily be made out of pillow stuffing and or foam with fur and feather textures.  I have yet to do experimental animation for this character, but I have started building him in pieces to tackle this challenge one step at a time.

That's all for now.  Thanks for reading and may God bless you!

Tried to Go Rogue

In my last post, I mentioned I was animating my old bionicles for fun.  Well, here are a couple of clips I animated purely for that reason.

Okay, so maybe it wasn't entirely just for fun.  I was experimenting to see how well these types of toys could be animated.  In the top video, the character's feet slide around a lot.  This led me to the conclusion that such toys require tie downs if you don't want that to happen.  The bottom video was an experiment to see how well the green screen can work.  Unfortunately, the toys reflect the green screen, so you would either have to manually "clean up" all the green reflections one frame at a time or animate on a real set.  This became very evident when I was putting together the animation below.

Unfortunately, there was too much green spill on this toy.  To make the video look better for YouTube however, I simply tinted the video blue and added white noise (to make it look like a Star Wars security hologram).

So what was the purpose of all this experimentation?  For the longest time, I wanted to make a Star Wars fan film.  However, I wasn't sure what topic or story to cover in the Star Wars Universe.  Then The Force Awakens was released a year ago.  Personally, I was a little disappointed with the fact that it felt more like a remake despite it being an enjoyable film overall.  I was also disappointed with Fynn's character and his defection to the rebels (oops, I mean resistance).  I felt his character and that situation could have been explored more in the movie (most likely they will in eps. 8 and 9).

Well, I now have at least a story idea.  However, I'm not that good at model making or puppet builds, and I can't afford someone else to make that stuff for me.  Then I find out that Lego has released buildable figures featuring characters from the movie.  The best looking one happens to be the First Order Stormtrooper.  So, I bought it for experimentation.

Nice, sure there are limitations, but it still animates rather nicely once you know what those limitations are.  Okay, but one of the real challenges is to see if you can make the character walk...

The video above features a small tie down table with predrilled holes.  It looks like animating a walk with these figures is possible.  Coincidentally, the star wars website announced a contest that asked participants to make a video related to the new movie Rogue One.  Suddenly I came up with a very simple and plausible idea in order to meet the deadline.  I had three weeks to make the film.  The following video was my entry for the contest.

   

Unfortunately, the website for the contest would not upload my video file.  I followed all the technical recommendations, and I know it wasn't my internet connection because the video had no problem uploading on YouTube.  At first I was disappointed and angry, but now I am over it.  The main reason I made this was to challenge myself as a film maker and animator.

I'm actually rather proud at what I did.  I like how the set turned out.  There are a couple of pieces of animation that didn't satisfy me, but overall I like it.  The lighting is satisfying, but at the same time disappointing.  On one hand, everything only has one shadow, simulating one sun in the outdoors of the planet.  On the other hand, there is a visible hot spot from a light on the set that is clearly visible in the long shots and couple of the medium ones as well.

Close up of set floor with lego tie down.

Tie down poking through the table, a layer of white clay, and a layer of kinetic sand.

A view from underneath.

Tie down easily snaps into the foot of the toy.

Palm tree with wire armature (see "roots") with paper bark and card stock leaves.

The hill for the back ground.  The "roots" help keep trees in place.

The set up for the last shot.  This is one of those times when my engineering education comes in handy.  I adapted my rig to hold the tree trunk at the right distance away from the set.

This egotistical nerf herder thought it be funny to take a selfie at the end of production.

I feel I have really grown a lot as a film maker these past couple weeks.  I also managed to make my first official Star Wars fan film.  I can't wait to work on the film I have planned which would take place between episode 7 and 8.  For now however, I must get back to other projects...

For Soil, I'm still experimenting with materials to animate.  As expressed in other posts, I'm still trying to achieve a unique texture for each character.  I have three of the characters figured out, so I have just one more to go really.  I might even start building the puppets soon.  I'm also cleaning out a garage on my parents' property, so I can have more space to animate, and to create bigger sets.

I'm also working on a couple of cartoons, but I'll give that update on another blog in another post.

Thanks for reading and may God bless you!

Celebrating 10 Years of Animatng

Woohoo!  It has been a wonderful 10 years!  Back in August of 2006, my dad and I did our first animation together.  It was a bionicle walking across the table and aiming his weapons at the camera.  The animation was about seven seconds and ran at 5 fps.  At the time, we were using a camcorder that could only capture six frames at a time with a rate of 30 fps.  Every week after church on Sunday, my dad and I would animate together coming up with new stories and characters.  It was because of this that I called my animation studio Father and Son Studios.  Now I animate by myself, but still with the loving support of both my parents.

I celebrate with my new animation reel showing my latest work:

Additionally, I was feeling some major nostalgia while looking back.  As odd as it may seem, I have kept at least a few of my bionicles, so I decided to animate them again.  I started with a figure from the same toy line of the one in my very first animation.

I'm actually rather proud that I was able to create the illusion of weight for his plastic gun.    There is a slight jitter on the left hand side of the screen.  That's me digitally covering up my reflection that was in the window in the background.  As implied, I plan to animate more of my old bionicles, mainly just for fun.  If these short videos become popular, I may be convinced to make a larger project featuring these old toys.  I might even make animations featuring new ones.

On top of all this, Laika also celebrated their tenth anniversary.  They are the amazing studio that has produced Coraline, Paranorman, and Boxtrolls.  Just today I watched their latest film Kubo and the Two Strings.  Although, the story is a little predictable, I highly recommend it.  It's essentially a hero's journey told in the setting of ancient Japan.  It's amazing how they keep pushing the boundaries of stop motion.  The film is so beautiful and surpasses their past films in the technique.  Such a wonder film to behold!

As for my soil project, I'm still experimenting with puppet building materials.  However, I'm getting close to solving some major problems.  I can feel it.

Thanks for reading and may God bless you!