I haven't made quite as much progress this week but I have had to focus on my elective hand-in so I've been unable to spend as much time on it as I have done. Despite this I have made a couple more tests, both with my puppet, and with some tissue paper to create stop-motion fire. As well as this, I've been able to make the props of the match and keys.
I made the props out of the same Fimo polymer clay that I used to make my lion's head. The keys are a little higgledy-piggledy but I think that matches with the style I've been going for in my animation so far. I don't have any photos of my match once it was painted but I've done some tests with it so you will see it later on in this post! I think the painting on both sets of props went quite well, I used a mix of my metallic gold paint and some browns, reds and blues on the keys, making some look a little more rusty with more reds, and more aged with blues, just so they didn't look too uniform.
The first test is of a tissue paper flame which I did to test if I could animate fire in the same shot as the puppet. I am pleased with the way it looks and how the smoke comes off but it was super time-consuming and fiddly, and doing that with the puppet in the shot as well would probably drive me a bit crazy, so I've decided that wont be doing that.
The next one is a run cycle where the lion is holding out the match, I want there to be a shot of him running through the streets with light slowly falling over the buildings behind him as he drags the sunrise with him. I think the run cycle could do with a bit of work, I'll probably need to use two rigs instead of one so that when both of his feet are off the floor he can remain upright, either that or i need to make a little green stand for his foot further away from the rig, as I ended up using a green highlighter in that test, which although sort of worked wasn't ideal as it wasn't stable. You can also see my hand flicker in, as I needed to support the rig at one point, which is why having more than one could be good to keep it all balanced out.
The next one is of him taking his keys out of his bag, which i feel like went okay, but next time I do this I'll have the keys in the bag from the beginning so it doesn't look so much like they suddenly magically appear in his hand. I am happy with how his new hands are working though, they're chunkier than the old ones were, but this has been pretty helpful when it comes to articulating them.
The last one is another match test that I did under the camera, which I found much more manageable. The tissue paper was much easier to manipulate so I'll definitely be animating the fire like this. I'll probably be keeping the match in the same shot as the puppet animation and keep the rostrum shot to the tissue paper, but I just wanted to play with how it would look when struck and blown out so included the match in this one.
I've also spent a bit of time on collecting photos for the backgrounds. I did try to make some paper collage ones a couple weeks ago but I feel like they're just too busy and will distract from the puppet, so am back to the original idea of using photos.
I'm going to go out with my DSLR soon to take some better ones as I don't want there to be a big difference in quality between the puppet and the environment, but for now here are some photos I've got from my phone camera:
Finally, here's my lion hanging out with Sam's Tin-can Tommy in the studio :) Once the stop-motion set-up with the DSLR is up next week we'll be taking turns to use it for our projects.
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