BA Hons Stop Motion Animation and Puppet Making

Happy New year!

This is my first proper animation with my new rig, with my funny little monsters Nibbol and Naw, it was nice to animate with them, it's been a while. I made these characters in second year as part of the two character interacting module and they have inspired new animation ideas ever since.

My dad has helped me convert the old conservatory that never got used properly, into a rig room so I can carry on my stop motion animating. Hopefully I can test out new ideas and build up more of my showreel. Got over 1 metre of space to animate on and I’ve just bought some great backdrops for backgrounds. So behold Render’s Rig Room! 😁

This was a lip sync test for my fat pig burglar character. In the scene he is telling his partner in crime that he has taken the last of the money out of the bank vault now and they are going to leave soon. I will be test animating majority of my dialogue for my FMP. With the limited materials and resources, I am just focusing on character performance with heads on sticks and not making full bodied puppets. I am using my home-made rig to do all my tests. So far these tests are coming out really well, there is no light flickering because I am using small LED lights that stay constant through animating.

So here it is! My finished stop motion animation rig! I have used various materials that I could find in my house including towels, blankets comma Paper, chairs and a lot of clothes pegs. I have blocked out all sources of light so I won't get any flickering in my animations from uneven lighting and just have the light source from my LED lights.

With the lock down, I now can't access the animation studios to use the stop motion rigs. I still want to animate because I enjoy doing it and want to carry on practicing, so I have been making my own rig at home, using whatever I could find. This included cardboard, towels, blankets and paper as well as a lot of clothes pegs!

To expand any showreel and too practice lip syncing in general, I have started a collection of animations called Literal Shorts. This is the first of them. My Literal Shorts will be animations based on literal sayings or song lyrics.

I have created an animation for The 11 Second Club, a website that selects one piece of dialogue from anything in entertainment, that is approximately 11 seconds long. They hold a competition each month for anyone to animate to and then they pick a winner, there is no prize, but you are mentioned on the website and people can comment on your work. The key thing the voters on this website look for is good lip syncing

For one of my external brief tasks, I chose to do the loop-de-loop competition. This competition was to create an animation that is able to be looped repeatedly.

These are characters I was going to use as extras in the bank, hostages of the burglars. However, now my idea has changed, the burglars are now comitting their crime at night with no one around. Also, I am keeping all of my characters as pigs to save time in the model making process.

So, my new idea now is to have two pig burglars robbing a bank and they get stopped by a pig in a costume called Arachnopig! I have found that I can make the story a lot more entertaining and action packed and really get a chance to test out my animation and lip syncing skills.

As you will see in the screenshots, I want a giant safe with space from there to the main doors to give Arachnopig room to perform.

I think I shall go with my second design, as I like the way it covers up most of the face, but leaves the mouth exposed for lip syncing. I think covering up most of the face gives my character a more mysterious and heroic look.

I have created a rough design I what I want to my place to pick characters to look like. They will have dark blue trousers and light blue shirts with black ties. They will also have a dark blue police hat. Am I to also design the uniforms in black. Whilst researching Please uniforms, black and blue were the main colours of them.

I am also going to work further with the design of the mask. I am possibly going with a mask like Batman so most of the face is covered with the mouth still exposed, as I want to do lip syncing in my final animation.

I think I will go with the black and white striped, as the fully black clothing makes my characters look more like ninjas in my opinion which is not what I’m going for.

This was a test hoof I made with wood and wire. I have used my pig anatomy references and learned that there is a solid hoof at the bottom and two finger-like claws further up the foot. I have not made it to scale as I wanted it to be big enough for experimentation. I feel it animated well and it has helped me understand the shaping and functionality of the hoof. This how I would animate the hoof if the characters were to function with them as hands, bending the wrist and using the two bottom claws as fingers.