Saturday, June 28, 2008

Shoes!

Shoes are almost done!I took a little break from finishing the new breathing armature (take 2) to work on his shoes. I had a bit of trouble with shoes last animation, so this time I made Sculpey (the cheap stuff) mockups of the shoes, then covered that in a thin layer of liquid latex. The latex turns into a thin rubber shoe, which I can glue the fabric on to easily. the soles are latex baked in textured molds, and will have small tiedown holes cut in them (once his feet are made). Just need some laces and some wear and tear added and they'll be good to go.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Breathing armature

So here goes the first breathing test for my new armature. It's just a few frames - some doubling and sequencing to get an idea of the movement, figure out how much to move it each frame.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

DSLR manual focus pull

A quick post of a 10 sec clip from Judder of a focus pull done manually on a Pentax K100D DSLR with a 18-55 lens. I painted a little dot lining up the beginning of the focus pull and other to mark the end, with an arrow to show which way to go (first time didn't do that and it came back to bite me in the @!) I just used the little ridges on the lens as guides, a third of a line per frame, animating every 2nd and 3rd frames to ease in and out.

Friday, June 20, 2008

Custom Action Figure finished!!


A little side project has been taking up a bit of time lately - and finally finished! A custom 9" B'elanna Torres Voyager action figure, missing from the release of official figures - made for a bday present. The clothes/body were used from other figures, but the head is completely custom. Even made of plastic so it squishes a little like the real ones! Now back to armature making!

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Documenting Judder


Now that my external hard drive is repaired and back I uploaded some of the documentation from 'Judder'. This was my ceiling camera rig! It's a 3x5' steel plate (with a lovely wood veneer - it was an old desk) bracketed to the ceiling. A monopod is held by a large magnet (originally used for hauling boats out of water) with a tripod head attached at the other end. The camera attaches and films upside-down. This gains access to areas normally obscured by the set and allows for easier perspective for some shots. The monopod could retract up to approx. 1' from the top of the rig, down to level with the set.

The streets, routered but not stained. The car is made of foam and will have LED's running off of batteries added, covered with foam coat and painted.

Staining the streets and beginning a tree.

A chaotic shot of the set in progress.

The sidewalks curve away from streetlights. Streets are routered and sidewalks are dremmeled.

To save time I inset all the tiedown screws ahead of time for the girl walking down the street. This was before I bought wingnuts, the greatest invention ever! The set was so large for some locations I needed someone to sit under the set and control tiedowns for every change while I held the character in place above.

Her umbrella frame, soldered together.

Her dress, hand stitched, on the Model Magic mockup of the character.

An idea of the scale of the first two characters. All characters in the other 2 sets are approx 6" tall.

The original streetlight design, changed as the light was too scattered.

Before I bought a cable remote for my camera I was using a wireless one - which turned itself off after 5 min or so. So if I wasn't ready for the pic I'd snap a disposable pic off to keep the remote working - and added extra light to the scene so picking them out and deleting later would be easy. The new cable remote is soo much less stressful!

A cut scene, as the LED streetlights failed during shooting. Would have been a focus pull of the girl walking down the street through the window of a house.

One of my exposure sheets.

Set 2 characters, fresh from the oven.

A bounce test before filming set 2.

Set 2 balls and characters pre wire and rig removal.

My main character's arm snapped off during the last shots - so I made a shoddy replacement by wrapping the armature wire around his body.

This was to get the shots from his perspective on the swing.

This was the camera rig used for his perspective view on the swing. The rotation disc is the same one used for the rotation when the kids are playing with the bin of school balls.