well everyone, the flying ship film is finished. It is called “Remote Responsibility” and it is uploaded for all to see on my youtube page. Here is the link:
I thought I would do some behind the scenes shots now. It all started with the idea of a flying ship flying across a large landscape. Here is the start of the ship.
Next came a few props and some set building. These are tiny orc huts for the outside landscape.
This is the captain’s bridge after all the shooting was complete.
This is the background painting for the outside set. It is done on a 8′ long piece of sheetrock (drywall).
This is the rig used to move the ship and the camera at the same time. A threaded rod pulls the whole sled along.
TThe jar of vaseline (used to lubricate the threaded rod) can be seen on the set below and give you a sense of scale.
The white jar is soldering flux, used as weight to make the sled hang straight down.
The sled is just scrap wood that slides along a metal tubing, pulled along by a threaded rod.
The bolt in the middle allowed me to move the ship and camera up or down to get the right angle.
This is a set shot before it was completely finished.
This shot the ship moved along, but the camera was stationary mounted off set.
This is after all the shooting was complete and the set tear down time has come.
I tried tiny black thread to hold up the ship, but every little breeze moved it, so I hot melt glued two rigid sticks to the top of the ship and erased them later in photoshop.
Ripping apart the cavern side where the ship rose vertically.
Some parts and props were saved, but most of the styrofoam landscape all got thrown away.
I finally get my woodshop back again. It was an incredible amount of space tied up with the set.
Stack of styrofoam scenery waiting for the trip to the dump.
Now time to start the next film. So go ahead, make a mess, have some fun.
Well, the last couple of days I have worked on the captain’s chair for the ship interior shot, it is wooden and will spin as the captain works all the controls, it is mostly done now.
I did a lot of paper mache work on the first scenery part, but had a bit of a problem. Where I am working on the set is different than where I store it so it has to be moved. The first time I moved it a lot of the paper mache cracked and fell apart. So today I redid some of it with thicker plaster mixture and I also added a big dose of wood glue to the mix. It seems to stick a lot better now. I painted some of the finished plaster flat black and then added some grass turf mixture to it with watered down white glue. More photos to follow, but just a quick update for tonight. I also realized I need to make a new puppet for the young deck hand. None of the ones I currently have will work for the young reckless puppet. I will probably start the wire armature for that tonight maybe.
As you probably know by now stopmoshorts.com is no longer up and running. And it seems that stopmotionmagic.com by Marc Spess is going to help fill in some of the void. To help faciltate this I have volunteered to help out on the site and Marc put me in charge of animation exercises every month. So the way it works is I post a theme, you can animate anything you wish to that theme. Puppets don’t have to be finished, sets don’t have to be done, flying rigs don’t have to be removed. There are no real rules. You can even post them anywhere you wish and just put a link to it in the right topic. And you can always go back and do the exercises from months before if you wish. Here is the link to the forum:
well…lately I have been working on my first lipsync film. It is simple and fairly short (about 30 seconds or so) but it is my first attempt at lipsync. Woolly monster in a deliberate effort to push me out of my comfort zone created a puppet for me with all the replacement mouths and eyes that I would need to animate lipsync. So, I had Don Carlson (prammaven) record a 30 second voice over for me, I sent him the script and he recorded it and sent it back to me within hours. Fine guy that one. So, I tried downloading jlipsync on woolly’s suggestion, but it required me to do a bunch of computer upgrades because my computer is not connected to the internet, so I had to upgrade a java machine, install service pack 2, download 2 years of window updates and finally got it working. Ran a test through it, and ran on a few problems, but it is a freeware program and looks pretty good. It shows you the mouth shape as it scrolls down the x sheet.
So, anyway, I finally ended up just putting the wav file into stopmopro (that i already have) and began scrubbing through the audio and writing down the mouth sound on a piece of paper with a pencil. Really hi tech I know.
Well, I figure I have a sound bite that is about 720 frames long. I have begun animating and have about 500 frames complete. The puppet is huge so it makes the animating pretty easy as compared to my puppets. Some of the lipsync so far looks really good, some is not perfect. It is a real art to scrubbing through audio and figuring out what mouth shape to use, especially since I am not the one that spoke the words.
I only animate at night to prevent flicker but during the day I am still working on the new set and sculpting some skin textures out of plastilina clay. I had recently bought roma plastilina but it has a sulfur smell so I had to give it away and order online the upgrade Prima plastilina. It has a more earthy, natural smell. The sulfur based clay gave my wife a migraine. So, a few days ago my prima showed up here and I am sculpting again. Pictures soon.
Go ahead, make a mess, leave your comfort zone, have some fun.
At the present time I have a few projects simmering in the background here at the puppet studio. The main one is a sound bite challenge I started at stopmotionanimation.com. I got Brett McCoy to compose a 30 second sound bite and a few of us animators signed up to animate something to it without hearing the sound bite first. All of the set building and flying rig posts you have been reading in the below posts are all for that project. My entry will be a bunch of my older puppets sliding down a grassy hill on wooden sleds. I have most of it filmed already, but I am using a flying rig in almost all of the shots so it is taking a long time to edit that out in every frame.
In the shop outside I am working on a ball and socket armature, I don’t even know what the puppet will be yet, but I am grinding and cutting and forming individual joints with the dremel tool and the butane torch.
Today I found some annealed wire at the local hardware store so I also started a wire armature today, and got it put together and some cushion foam glued up around it for muscles, and I still don’t know what that puppet is going to be yet either.
I also have a wonderful puppet sitting here that Woolly Monster in the UK sent me that has all the parts for lip sync but I want to make up a set especially for it. Sorry, Ceri I haven’t gotten to it sooner but I want to build a dedicated set for it.
I also am toying with a new story idea. Ron mentioned in one sentence a few days back that he would like to see my goblin puppet (the main puppet from “free with purchase” ) again maybe doing some castle gardening. That sounds like a great set and beginning of a good film. So imagine “a goblin gardener on the castle grounds working away in a little garden filled with different plants and vegetables in front of a English type cottage…that is where the story begins….and then all hell breaks loose…..that is all I have so far, but in my mind it looks great.
I am researching new cameras that have manual aperture and shutter speed settings since mine does not.
I am researching english cottages for the above mentioned film short.
That is mostly all that I am doing right now. OH, except the sketchbook swap that we are in the middle of. I think that is all….
Paul Vortex and others from the stopmotionanimation forum put together a short film as an appeal to hollywood to use stopmotion animation for the special effects instead of CGI in the remake of Clash of The Titans which was originally done by the stopmotion legend Ray Harryhausen. You can view the film here.
The following is from Paul Vortex and are not my words
“Clash of the Titans is to be remade by Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures.This is an appeal to those organisations to make this version of the film in a manner that honours what came before… by using Stop Motion Animation for the creature effects.
It is an appeal that they use this film as a vehicle to show the World how much stop-motion has evolved with Modern-Technologies to become the most impressive technique for realising creature effects on screen.
Almost all the visual effects in Hollywood are now done with CGI… And there is no reason for that to be the case. Stop-Motion and animatronics are far more impressive visual art-forms.
So, we ask that they are used in this production, to honour the original version, and the body of work created by Ray Harryhausen and others (Phil Tippet/O’bie etc).
Please get involved, leave a comment – But more importantly – write a letter to Legendary Pictures :
Legendary Pictures
4000 Warner Blvd.
Building 76
Burbank, CA 91522
*all footage and music used is done so under “Fair Use” (US copyright Law) and “Fair Dealing” (UK copyright Law). These clips are used for review and educational purposes only.
