Puppets
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The puppets for this particular project brought a couple of challenges with them. The design and materials used for the skeleton weren't bad at all, but I needed to change the way I made heads and hands. In 'ES', my first 'big' shortfilm, I used balsawood heads and wireframe hands with plasticine draped over them for the skin. This allowed me to give the puppets some facial animation with very low effort. After 'ES' though, I got recommended to lay off with the plasticine skin, and try something more permanent and better looking. Of course the first thing that came to mind was silicone. Making silicone puppets create a number of new challenges: how to animate the face? And the mouth?! And you know...how does silicone work? What is the material like? Luckily, the latter of these questions were solved before this shortfilm even began preproduction. In October, we started an assignment at school where we had to make a shortfilm about the pandemic. I saw this as a chance to make another stop motion film, and to experiment with silicone puppets. However, the learning curve for this was so steep, by the time I had a decent puppet, I didn't have any time to animate the film, and I had to call it quits. But, I did gain a substantial amount of knowledge from this failure to pour in to this new project. Not all the questions were answered though. I still did not know how to animate the face, mouth and all. I also had some troubles with attaching the hands to the puppets in a sturdy, yet not permanent way. So how were the puppets for 'And I Forgot' made? The skeleton is a standard aluminiumwire frame, but I substituted the balsawood torso and pelvis, with a 3d-printed one, which granted me volumetric consistency, should one or the other have to be replaced. In regards to animating the face, I found a design of a faceplate, shared in a Facebook group centered around stop motion. It was just a rectangle with two holes to stick the eyes in, and some aluminiumwire for the eyebrows and jaw. To this day, I don't know how I didn't come up with this by myself. It's so simple, yet extremely effective. When it came to securing the hands to the wireframe, I came up with something that I found pretty clever at the time, but after some animating, found out it wasn't the best idea: using wire connectors, found inside terminal strips. I glued one side of these connectors on the frame using exposed wire from the frame and two-component glue. The other end could hold the wire from the back of the hands, and be tightly screwed in the connector. At least that was the theory, and it seemed to kind off work in practice, but the more I moved the hands, the more I realised the screws weren't strong enough to hold the wire down for long periods. Oh well, some more knowledge to bring into next project. I then sculpted heads straight onto the faceplate, that way I was sure it would fit. I made silicone molds of these sculptures, and then used the same frame to pour the silicone around it. The hair is made from hennep and is superglued in layers onto the silicone. For the eyes, I used beads with a hole drilled into them. The body was modeled with foam, and needed no skin on top of it, since it was going to be covered with clothes anyway. The clothes were sown by me, out of old towels and handkerchiefs, since around the time I needed to make clothes, the shops had closed down again due to the pandemic. |
Puppet from 'ES'
Puppet from 'untitled project'
Skeleton + head from puppet 'And I Forgot'
Terminal strip with cable connectors inside
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