Life Drawing 5

This was the last life drawing session. I hope there will be more in the future but the scheduled weekly sessions are done for now.

The swing project

As our first deadlines for both the drawing module and the illusionists tool-kit are drawing near I am faced with the heart breaking consequences of time constraints. I must say I may have been too ambitious with this projects or maybe I over-estimated the amount of time I had to do this (probably a mix of both) but hopefully the result will still look good. 

My mood board features the works of Dave McKean, Michel Ocelot and Yuriy Norshteyn as well as some images from books and films I loved as a child. I also included a rag-doll because that was the look I wanted to go for for the character of mini-me.

This was a project about childhood so obviously my first idea contained dragons and pirates and living in the jungle. Never mind that it was only supposed to be about a swing in a playground and I am a first year animation student working on her own, I needed those dragons! So in my storyboard the swing is a bit of bridge between the two. This might sound forced but I did pretend to ride dragons and fly to fantastical lands when I was on swings as a child so it felt right to me. The idea was to have the character swinging and imagining herself in various adventurous situations. I was going to use stop motion for all the real-world swinging things and the fantastical would be cut-out animation inspired mostly by Yuriy Norstein (although I can not deny that the character design for the cut-out part looked a lot like bonnie from Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's children's book “Crazy hair”).

I soon realized I wouldn't have enough time to do all of that so I decided to just focus on the stop motion swing for the time being. I might return to this idea at a later time. 

To begin with, I had to build a set and a puppet. I knew I needed a swing and a picnic table for the set. I didn't want to build all the other things on the playground as I thought they would detract the attention from the swing. However I also felt that with just the swing the set might look a bit empty, so I decided on the picnic table. Getting the scale right was important as I didn't want to waste too much wood. I knew the puppet would be about 10 cm so I built the table and swing accordingly.  

The swing construction was too heavy at the top so it wouldn't stand on its own. This was no a problem though since I could just stick it to the set. I got the chain from a hardware store and to make it stop-motion-friendly, I threaded a piece of aluminium wire through it.

For the puppet I used a simple aluminium wire armature, which took me a couple of attempts to get right.

This first try was too stiff. I had to get rid of the epoxy in the middle.

The second try (on the left) was still too sturdy for such a small armature while the second one was too tall and a bit wobbly.

This is the final one

It then took me about a day to finish the set and the puppet. I used a 1m x 1m piece of MDF and various types of model-making grass for the base. For the tire that would go on the swing I first tried to use plasticine but that turned out to be too heavy so I chose polystyrene instead. This was also the material I used for the puppet head. It is very light so there is no danger of having a top heavy puppet. I just painted a simple face on the puppet head, which I am quite pleased with as it brought me back to my original rag-doll idea.

The beginning

Getting there

I felt it would make the construction more stable to give the tire its own wire.

This was too heavy and wouldn't hold in place when I tried to move it.

Polystyrene worked a lot better 

I used cotton to give the puppet a bit of "fat".

The finished set and a michelin man lookalike 

 I used some old fabric to make the clothes and paper to make the hair. 

The background will be 2D. I had originally planned to animate something with pastel colours but I wasn't happy with the tests I made and I started drawing and colouring a different image. Depending on how much time I have, it will either be this image or something more elaborate based on it:

This is the first test with pastels:

I shot some test footage and apart from the fact that there is an accidental camera shake in it, I am quite happy with how it turned out. Hopefully I can shoot the final product on Monday.