A New Moe Begins

Welp, a lot of people in the entertainment industry tell me that its all about the small victories. This morning I whipped up a batch of perfect looking foam, got it all in on the first try and waiting for it to slightly gel before turning up the temp. Bang on the money! About time I got back on the production track!

I did try a couple of front light / back light tests but they turned out horrible. I just don't have the lighting system / room to do anything great, at least that's my excuse for now. I did buy some poster boards to try a bit more later on. But for now I've scaled down the size of the shooting area down to a single curved green poster board. No tie downs, just rigs and a camera. This is going to be interesting. Sadly one of the things on the list have already been knocked off :( Welp, gotta keep on truckin' - it's about that time now... to turn on the oven that is.

P.S. Thanks ya'll for the encouragement! Also thanks Mike for all the info you've generously given to me and the whole SMA community!

Edit: Uh oh, maybe I didn't add enough gelling agent because usually after 20-ish minutes it really thickens up, so far it's still whippey. We'll see after 2.5 hours.
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NOoooo...

The puppet didn't come out as perfect as I had hoped, but it came out intact. The major problem is the mold (which was poorly made in the first place) has broken. I wanted to pop out one more Moe puppet before it met it's demise but the mold has spoken.

There are issues with the foam though, small bubbles appearing on the surface (not too bad), a big airpocket residing in his lower back (kind of bad), and a small rip on under his right armpit (I think it's fixable).

The plus side is it's cooked properly this time, the smell isn't bad at all (proving that my previous puppet had a lot of ammonia in it still) and I can pull off my film with just the one puppet. There's a shot I want to do that involved two puppets but I think I can composite my way through it. Got my cheap priced (and cheap quality :/) green screen poster board and I'll be on my way with this film... once I get the puppet done... starting tomorrow morning :)

The Next Step

The film I plan on creating has some fast paced action sequences in it (at least as far as I've intended), but I've never done any type of such animation. SO! I'm going to try and do a Patrick Boivin style fight scene. Anyone who's doing stop motion has probably seen his Iron Man vs. Bruce Lee video:



From what I can tell, I'm almost positive he uses a complete green screen for each puppet, inter-mingling some shots that include both puppets, a panoramic background, and a virtual camera. Add in some cool effects, great sound, and an awesome soundtrack and you got yourself a hit youtube video clip. There are a few things I'll need to put together to achieve this. I believe he uses a lot of braces, as if it were rod puppetry, and masks it out later. I've been doing a little of that with Moe but my helping hands can't take too much weight. So I may need a giant support beam of some sort to hang the helping hands from, which hopefully won't cause lighting problems. But first things first, I have to make 2nd Moe, this time with actual bone structure.

Here's the list of the challenges I hope to complete while doing this clip.

1. Try out the dolly.
2. A rack focus of some sort.
3. Slow motion effect (toughy, but try it out none-the-less)
4. Over a minute of animation.
5. Motion blur.

EDIT:
6. Frontlight / Backlight!

Alright! Here goes!

So much has happened...

Been quite awhile since the last post, I've been caught up in this frenzy of catching up with the news and it has turned me a little bit bitter. Sometimes I ask friends a few questions and we immediately jump into an argument - the beauty of politics. I feel like I've been so detached from the world, sitting inside my little bubble blissfully ignorant of life outside it. It has become such a ghastly place recently - the U S of A and I'm ashamed I didn't make myself aware of it much earlier.

BUT! On the bright side it gave me a great concept for a film that I think has enough merit to pursue to the end. I don't know if I'll be able to tell the whole story in anything around ten minutes though but we'll see... maybe 20 will do (10 minutes is already ambitious -.-). With a few tips from my friend Jim, I came up with a sketch of the protagonist - Milton James Harvey.



This is the evolution of the Moe character - pretty neat how far he's gone :)

Speaking of Moe I did this really small commercial clip using a Butterfinger bar. I'll admit that I had 8 days to do it, slacked off the first 4, got sick the next 3, and did this overnight haha. I am so driven -.- Because of the time restraint I'm not really proud of it, but practice is practice none-the-less. The light was too low, the clip was too short, the list goes on and on... but my dad and I got to make some chairs!

Here it is:

Moe's Disco Dance - Contest Entry!

During my time practicing the animation with Moe I came across this contest at etsy.com - a place to buy/sell handcrafted goods. What better than a stop motion animation to fit the theme: "A Handmade Moment".

So I tried a couple of different moves and for the past few days have been working on just this little tiny 30 second clip as an entry. It's amazing what you can learn doing something like this and I've certainly gained a mountain of knowledge from doing this minuscule clip. It seemed easy to do at first but post-production (mostly cause of my own laziness during animation) took far longer than I anticipated. Never-the-less after just two normal work days and then two sleepless nights I've completed it and I'm pretty satisfied.

Any tips / critiques about the animation are extremely welcome. If you really like it drop a vote - but I'd love a comment about anything I can do to up the animation game. Thanks for lookin'!

Even More Practice

This time to some music by Kevin MacLeod.