Big Baby Madness

With the new Gammon film finally finished and out the way, (see here: Gammon)  I've decided to go back to basics.

I want to do a few short pieces, most recently I created a new Georges reviews. (See here: Georges reviews)

And for this month I've decided to do the 11 second club. This will keep me from spending the next couple of years on a single project.
I want to work on short pieces like this and will probably do some more Georges reviews over the coming months whilst I work out what my next big project will be.

I'm hoping to get the Gammon film into festivals for this and next year and if successful I may be working on the continuation of that.

But for now we have the 11 second club, a short monthly animation competition in which you animate to a piece of dialogue, see link if you are interested: 11secondclub.com

Now after all my babble, here's the interesting stuff, the pictures!

This is the mother character with a few mouth designs

This is the big baby character with a few mouth ideas

And here is my unintelligible storyboard
(If you can understand this then you are a very smart person)

       These are just my initial idea pages, there will be more up soon and it should make a bit more sense.

 I'll keep updating as the month and project go on, so keep checking back for more updates!

11 second club update

As i mentioned in my last post, i am doing the 11 second club this month, it's been a really fun little project to work on and has been really enjoyable.
The animation is now finished and so i thought I'd post it up here for all to see, i hope you enjoy it.

The mouths i used for this puppet

Here i am hard at work animating him

(Update)
The film is now up on the 11 second club website: http://www.11secondclub.com/
Make sure you visit and vote, i'm keeping my fingers crossed and am now getting ready to start this months animation, more updates soon, thanks for watching guys

Also I have now finished work on the music video i was working on, (more on that soon) and I now have big things planned for the future, i will give more details when things are finalised but these are very exciting times, keep on watching.

Rabbit lip sync

Okay, i've finally got round to sorting out my blog and getting myself together, so i am going to update on what i've been up to and then will post updates of all projects i will be working on.

So to start with i thought i would put up the work from a project that i really enjoyed working on: Rabbit lip sync.



This film was created when i was in my second year of university (now graduated)
I first started by interviewing people around the Stoke-on-Trent area.
I found a funny fisherman who had a lot to talk about, he was mostly talking about fishing but finally he started to talk about his garden and his vegetables.

When listening back the audio i had recorded, images were conjured up of this big brown rabbit on a vegetable patch.

Here is what i did:


After a lot of concepts for this character (that i have unfortunately now misplaced) i created many different rabbit maquettes

 

 

 

 After this i created a simple garden set using foam board and coloured Fimo.

 

I created a foam board fence and drew on lines with an ink pen

 

I used fake grass from a hobby shop to create the ground and a ball of tin foil covered in orange Fimo to make the pumpkin

 



This was a simple drawing to see if the rabbit puppet would work on film


 

Next it was time to create the rabbit.

I felt that in true Aardman style i would create the rabbit out of Plasticine, this was an esthetical choice as i felt it would look best on my brightly coloured set.

I began by creating a pumpkin that would be secured to the set, i then built the armature of the rabbit from the pumpkin. I did this because the rabbit puppet would not be getting up and walking and would remain on the pumpkin for the duration of the animation.



The eyes and nose were created using Fimo. The eyes were secured into tin foil covered eye sockets and Plasticine was moulded around them to keep them in place.
The eyes had tiny holes in the centres so that they could be moved easily with a pin

I created the rabbit without a mouth as all of the mouths would be replacements

I next created the rabbits replacement mouths:

Rabbit with his A mouth

And here is the finished rabbit puppet:

Then all that was left to do was the animating (my favourite part!) Here are some shots of my set up:

 

 

 

I really enjoyed working on this project, it was really fun and i hope to work on more projects like this in the near future

And that's all I've got to say about my rabbit animation, here is the link to watch the video, please enjoy:

https://vimeo.com/17490055