Wednesday 30 November 2016

Memory Project


For this project we were given the task of recalling a memory from our past, recording it and then creating a film from the recording. The memories we could record could be anything we remembered, however the only stipulation was that we were not supposed to think too hard about what memory we would speak about. Since the best account of a story can sometimes be one which is told the first time around- with the stammering and pauses included. To record our memories we went along to Alison House, were we had organised ourselves into to pairs to record, one to recount their memory and the other to record them. We had about 20 minutes to record our memories which was just enough time to record a couple each, before the next group came along and the group before would show them how to use the recording equipment. I ended up recounting about 3 memories, the first one being about the time an old man began to talk to me about a boil on his groin and the other two were kind of a duo in which I talk about the funny things my mum and dad have done. I remember struggling to think of any other memories once I had done a couple, being put on the spot and trying to recount something off the cuff, is much harder than it looks. 

Storyboard Thumbnails:

Once I had my recordings I began to listen to them over and over, trying to visualize in my head how I would go about animating them. I knew from the get go I wanted to animate this film in stopmotion, so when visualizing the scenes in my head I also had to take this into consideration. To get the ball rolling I began to write down everything I was saying in the recordings as I listened to them. I would then place the script into a small storyboard thumbnail format so that I could work out what would be happening on screen as I was talking. This process did take a while, however It really helped me visualize how the film would pan out and gave me an rough Idea of weather or not the visuals would work in relation to the memory being told. 

First Memory- "The old man with the boil problem":




This storyboard (above) was the first memory I ended up recording. It was quite a funny yet traumatic  experience (at least for me) and I though this might have been a good memory to make a film out of. With this one though, I began to fall into the trap of simply recounting what happened in the visuals, and I found it quite difficult to break away from this. I'm not entirely sure why this was, perhaps it was maybe because I felt trapped within the setting of the memory or perhaps I was just approaching it to literally because it was the first one. In the end however I didn't end up going for this one I felt like my other recording had a better flow to it and I liked the story behind that one more.  

Second Memory- "The weird things that they do": 



This was my second memory and it recalled the time when my mum decided to put a basket ball net in the bin because it had a hole in it (its meant to by the way) and the time my dad was screaming up the stairs while he was fixing blinds on the landing, shouting "i'm blind, i'm blind", holding them over his eyes. I really liked this recording and preferred it to the last. I think it was perhaps because it wasn't about me but the weird things my parents do and I could see this being funnier than the previous recording so I knew I wanted to do this one. Again  the way I approached this was the same as the last and likewise it really helped me to work out what I was going to do visually within the film. 

Character Design:

Once I knew what recording I was going to continue with I began to think about how the characters would look and how I would want to portray them. I originally wanted not to have to draw myself and my parents and began to sketch out simplistic blocky shaped characters and such. I wanted to play around with the idea of shapes and how using different ones can differentiate characters from one another. However as I began to think of more ways to do this, I found myself strangely hitting a creative block. I really wanted to create different looking characters, ones that didn't necessarily look like my mum, dad and myself however I think that because I knew I was going to be animating this in stopmotion. I kind of hindered myself a little, playing it safe by just desiding to try and make models of the way they actually looked in a stylized way. This is not a bad thing however, its just something that I wasnt sure I was happy with. 

        

      

In the last couple of pages you can see that I began to think about how I would make the heads of the characters, still thinking about simplistic shapes as I was designing the more normal characters.

Possible Final Character Designs:

Once I had the characters designs I thought I was going to use, I went ahead and began to create character sheets for them. This would allow me to get a feel for the characters and help me design the stopmotion versions when it came time to make them into models.

Dad:



For my dad, I knew he was going to be the tallest character since he actually is in my family. He also has big arms and hes pretty strong so I wanted to convey this in his design, with his Popeye-esk barrel arms. While having some squared off edges, he still has a lot of round shapes in his form, to make him appear more friendly and "dad like" if there even is such a thing. 

Mum:




For my mum, I gave her a lot of round shapes too as a way of securing that friendly character aesthetic, making her appear very "mum like". 



Me:



For myself, I wanted to make my character reflect the fact that I look like my dad, so my character reflects many of the same quality's his character does. I'm just a little smaller.  

For each of the characters I made sure to try out a range of different face poses and body gestures relating to my recordings narrative so that I can reference these when I go to create my models. I also drew out the characters from each side with this same purpose in mind. Again it was good to do this because I found that it was something else I could look at and refer back too when making the frames of my models making it come in handy. 

Creating the Animatic: 

Once I had somewhat figured out my characters, I began to go ahead and create a proper animatic. Using my thumbnails as a starting point I began to draw it up in Photoshop, using its timeline and layer system which is really handy since you can now insert audio into it and it will play while you animate. This allowed me to get timings more accurate and will help when it comes to filming. During this process I ended up changing a lot of things to fit the audio, such as camera angles and what the characters would be doing at certain points within some scenes. This was just due to the fact that I was able to listen to the audio and get a better sense of how things would play out in the film. The version you see above is an incomplete version with only half of it being done at this point, since I didn't have a lot of time left and I wanted to make a start on making the models which is what really eats up your time when making a stopmotion film. I stopped creating the animatic right in the middle of the two stories, just before I go on to talk about my dad and his blind pun. I did this so I would be able to go back to it at a later point and add that bit on if I had the time, making it more convenient for the limited amount of time I have to make it in. After talking with the tutors there are a few changes I wish to make to the animatic to get it perfect, but again at this point I was more concerned with getting the model making started.   

Creating The Models:

Firstly, It has been a while since I have done any stopmotion and equally I have not really had much experience making a proper model before, so there was a lot of trial and error involved in making the armatures, during this part of the project.


  
I began to plan out how I would build the armatures. I first drew out a scaled drawing of my models on sheets of A4, the process being handy as it gave me a template I could follow to get the size and proportions of my models right. Referencing theses templates I figured I could just begin with a full wire frame for the skeleton of my models. Adding the body around it, however I liked the idea of being able to replace parts if need be and so I ended up deciding to make individual limbs that could plug into bulkier parts of the models, allowing them to be easily replaced if they got broken. 


Building the Bulky Body Parts: 
                                                                                    

To start of with, to form the bulkier parts of the the bodies, like the head, torso and the hips and to keep them all light, I decided to make them all out of Balsa wood. Balsa wood is light and easily manipulated meaning that it would be easy to make the shapes I wanted to produce and so I figured this would be a good choice to go for.


The first step was to cut multiple squares of equal size out of the Balsa wood from the longer cut pieces. Then I would put some wood clue in between the cut squares and then sandwich them together in the vise (as seen above) to make sure that they would all stick together securely giving me a larger shape to work with to for the bulky body parts. 





Once the glue had set and the Balsa pieces were stuck together, I began to trim off the edges at angles to give me a sloping roundish shape. This shape being smaller at the top and larger at the bottom for myself and my dads puppet torso's. I then went ahead and sanded down the square edges until I got the shape right (as seen above). This process was repeated for the other parts on the models as well, the only difference was my mums armature torso which ended up being more square in shape and instead of being one whole piece, ended up needing to be made in two separate pieces and then stuck together again with the wood glue (as seen below).






Finally I had all of the bulky parts of the models sorted and what was great was that they were all still super light. The next step now is for them to be drilled with holes so I cal put the K&S brass square tubing into them so the would wont split.


Drilling Holes for the Armature Wire Limbs:




Using the table drill, I was able to make some nice clean holes for the K&S square brass tubing to slide into. This would allow me to glue in the armature wire into the holes and then if need be pull them out without damaging or splitting the wood. 


Twisting the Wire:


I then went ahead and began to twist the armature wire round 4- 3 times so it would be a bit thicker and more secure when using to pose or hold the models weight. Areas like the neck didn't need as meany turns due to only being used to support the head. 


                                     


The ends of the wire being hooked at the end, ended up not being able to fit into the square brass tubing so I ended up having to snip the ends off, which made them a little weaker and I was worried that they would un- twine because of this. However I figured that the solution to this would be to cover the ends of the wire in super sculpy and bake them. Essentially allowing the wire to be held strongly together in its hard super sculpy exterior- and this ended up working!


Making Hands: 



I then began to think about my models hands, I figured this would be the difficult part however I ended up just drilling small holes into the side and top and then sticking evenly sized X2 twisted wire into them and boom we got some hands!


Securing the wire to the balsa wood and adding hands: 







To secure the wire to the not only the inside of the K&S square brass tubing but to everywhere else, I firstly tried using Uhu Glue but after hours of waiting for it to set this still wouldn't work. Calum and Peter ended up suggesting that a hot glue gun would do the trick, and sure enough it did. It dries untill its in a solid state which held the wire securely in place. Not like the Uhu glue which remained a liquid for some reason. Ugh why didn't I think of that sooner! 

Adding Feet: 






I ended up using Milliput for the feet, since I knew I wanted the feet to be a bit more secure I ended up using this as it can be sculpted and left until it dries rock solid. This I figured was perfect for what I wanted to do and I left it over night to dry. 


Crafting Props/ Background: 





At this point I began to start making some props that I would need for my film. During the process of creating the animatic and thumbnails I knew I wanted to keep the background very limited and bare bones if I was going to doing stopmotion. As you can see in the animatic the background is infinite white and has very little in it besides a few things to reference location and things that the character interact with and so above you can see me making cardboard boxes and the frame of what will act as the garage door. These were fairly easy and simple to make, however I think I will go back and make other boxes at some point. Those were just for quickness sake, since I was running out of time fast and wanted to start filming soon. 

Adding "Bones":




With the left over Milliput I had, Neil the departments technician ended up suggesting that I should add bones to the arms and legs of the puppets to give myself somewhere to grip when animating and to act as a visual indicator for where the wire should bend. 

Adding Tin to the Feet:


So I could use the magnets, I ended up cutting up some tine cans so that I could add them to the soles of my puppets feet so that they would magnetize through the floor of the stage and be more stable to animate with. 

Set Design:







Again when it came to setting up the set, it was fairly easy to replicate an infinite white space. However when I say it was 'fairly' easy, I mean it wasn't all bad but there was a large amount of fiddling with the lighting I had to do so that the lights did not hit the back wall and even then it still happened. But overall it ended up doing the job and I could finally start doing some tests with the armatures.

Armature Tests:

When it finally came to doing some tests with the armatures, I wanted to do them in this unfinished state to see whether or not they would be ok to animate with, and not fall apart. Another reason I wanted to do it straight away, was to see if I liked the style of the characters as they were now with their blank blocky features. Its like I have came full circle with their designs, as originally I had wanted the characters to look like this in my first initial drawings. I actually quite liked this aesthetic, however I will need to see if it will work with the narrative and framework of the film. The moment of truth had finally come!


Dad Armature Test_001 from Tyler Carrigan on Vimeo.


Mum Armature Test 001 from Tyler Carrigan on Vimeo.


Tyler Armature Test 001 from Tyler Carrigan on Vimeo.

The Problems With Magnets...

I really hate magnets. While it was nice to do stopmotion again after so long, and I feel that the tests were successful and I am pretty happy with them, I really found the magnetic feet to be a pain. When animating my 'dad' armature in particular, while the magnets were strong they were not strong enough to keep it up or the others up when simply bending over or doing walk cycles. This was really frustrating as it meant that I had to spend ages re-positioning them. Making the long process of animating in stopmotion even longer. I think the next steps for me will be to replace the feet and add bolts into them so I can use tie down instead. I feel like for me that is the superior way to do it, since there is no chance that your armature will move from its position if its bolted to the floor.  Before I can do this however I wanted to go ahead and try animating a scene in my film with these armatures, letting me see what It might look like with them as the are in the film.

Current Version Of the Film:

"The Weird Things That They Do" Memory Film- Current Version from Tyler Carrigan on Vimeo.

Overall I do like the armatures as they are in this unfinished version of the film however I feel like they need eyes or just something to make them stand out a bit more. Previously I have talked with Jared about fully painting them one block colour, like white or something, but I think that's something I will need to test out. We also discussed facial features in post which is also an option and again something I will test out. Before I animated this version of the film (the first scene), I went ahead and bought larger card and doubled up on the magnetic bases, using two this time. This gave me a large enough set to get a better result out of the infinite white setting I'm trying to create however I think it may need to be even bigger, since there are still shadows that hit the background, this may however be a case of playing around further with the lights.

Thoughts on the project: 

I feel that this project has been a good one overall. I have quite enjoyed the process and its been really awesome being able to sink my teeth back into stopmotion again after so long- even if its sometimes frustrating (*coughs* Magnets). However I really would have liked more time on this project, but due to our busy schedule this year its been tough. It is however something I will be continuing on with after the hand in. I want to now finish this for my mum and dad, so I can dedicate this to them and maybe give them it as a Christmas present maybe... here's hoping, but overall just give them something I have made that  hopefully makes them laugh. In conclusion, I feel like this has been a really good opportunity to learn about the trial and errors of model making and has certainly taught me another valuable lesson about time management, particularity when it comes to stopmotion.