After long deliberation with tutors I decided upon using 6 different mouth shapes for my head that are attached by the stickiness of the plastercine alone and smoothed over this was a lot easier than creating some kind of shelf locking system protruding from the neck. The mouth shapes all started as matching blocks of plastercine over time I have sculpted them into the shapes of the needed phonetics trying to shed as much weight along the way.

Here are a few more of my test animations.

Ammending problems

After making my first few attempts of the puppet and realizing its strengths and weakness’s I was able to create a new puppet that was rid of the problems that the first ones encountered these included; being too small and trying to get all of the mouth shapes out of one plastercine mouth. I also noticed that by stopping the neck at the shoulders and starting the torso in another colour wasn’t working as they tended to split apart whilst moving the neck I will overcome this by making a small layer of skin attached to the neck all over the torso and then applying the t-shirt and jacket over the top of that to stop the splitting. I overcame the problem of the splitting the mouth during talking by researching some of the great stop-motion movies to see how they overcame this, animators in movies like the nightmare before christmas used a process called replacement animation which uses an array of head shapes/mouth shapes for the characters, Jack had over 300 head shapes throughout the entire film. I decided that this is the way I should go and proceeded to chop the jaw off my newly made bigger puppet (which you can see in the video) . The new puppet employed some of the same techniques from the first with things like the armature being created from two balls of newspaper and duct tape and slightly thicker wire forming the spine as well as things like the eyelids for the blinks as these worked well on the first puppets.

recycling plastercine

 

I have recently realized that a wire jaw will not work as I can not express the amount of movement needed to show convincing lip sync. I decided to recycle all of the plastercine used to create my first few models as they are useless.

This is the second model I have created for my animation, this model contains interchangeable eyelids, movable eyes and a wire bendable jaw. It contains an armature made from newspaper and duct tape to form a small skull a wire neck and shoulders this is then screwed down to my set using straps. Here is a small test animation I did using the animation software 'iMotion' on my iPhone.

start of animation

This is the first practice model for my new stop motion animation which will portray a head asleep in a strange world made of plastercine. The head will be stung by a beatboxing fly and will be infected then going on to beatbox himself to death. The main part of my animation is the lipsyncing to the beatbox which has never really been touched upon in animation before. I built this model to discover if their are any problems with the materials or approaches to the construction of the model before going into full production of the animation. I will probably have to redo this a few times because during shooting a stop motion animation you have to work in a 'straight forward' manner working from the first frame to the last without mistakes. This is going to take a fair bit of planning and will probably go wrong if I use the first model I create.

I do really like the colour scheme of this model and probably going to be the colours I use in my final animation, but their are huge problems around the mouth. If I where to animate at this scale which is about 3 inches high I would be unable to get believable movement from the mouth as well as the fact that it has no jawbone and moves in a weird way.