project blog

for all the bits of the project that i did.

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“A PRINCE OF MONKEYS” - a puppetry/digital animation fusion by loren hardy and toby pritchard.

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THE FINISHED VERSION:

this is the completed, cut-together version of the final piece, as edited in adobe after effects by toby. displayed on screen is now the culmination of our collaboration, with the ‘performance’ aspect by the both of us, with the physical puppet designs made by me, surrounded by the colourful scenery that was created digitally by toby.

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while this was a collaborative project, obviously there were some things we did together and other things we did separately. beginning with what we did individually:

loren (me):

making 3D elements - a monkey test puppet (full body), the large head of the water demon, a smaller monkey puppet (half body, i constructed the head & torso), and two potential mask faces for the monkey king.

some design sketches, some storyboard thumbnail ideas.

puppeteering the monkey prince and the water demon.

toby:

making 3D elements - a monkey test puppet (half body), the arms of the final monkey prince puppet, and the crown prop used for both monkey characters.

some design illustrations and storyboard thumbnail ideas.

wearing the monkey king mask/costume.

editing the videos, adding the digital ‘scenery’ to the videos.

stuff we did together at the same time:

dying (most of) the raffia that we used in the costumes/puppets.

discussion at pretty much every stage, checking each other is doing what we agreed on, giving each other notes on what is working (or not).

filming: in principle if one of us is filming behind the camera the other was performing a character in front of the camera.

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FILMING:

for our day of filming, it involved a lot of improvisation when it came to how to capture the necessary footage to then be edited into a final piece. this is an example of how things went: typically the performance of characters was divided between us and if someone was ‘performing’ a character then the other team member was behind the camera, however in this clip it required both of us to create the effect of the crown falling down onto the head of the prince monkey - i manipulated the puppet while toby lowered the crown which was attached to a length of string taped to it.

obviously, my face is strikingly visible here, and so is toby’s hand as he lowers the crown, however, these non-puppet elements will be magically erased through the power of adobe after effects.

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FILMING.

first, a hasty storyboard drawn up the morning before filming clips we need. its creation involved discussion between both of us, but toby did all of the drawing + words on this page.

images 2 & 3 show my main contribution to the actual ‘animation’ part of the project, as i was the one operating both the smaller monkey prince puppet and the large sea demon puppet (we attached a pole to the inside of the dome ‘head’ so i could hold it up while being hidden by the grass ‘body’.)

image 4 shows a bit of the setup we’d created for ourselves - pretty simple, it was just a couple of black curtains for a backdrop and a single stage light with red and yellow gels on it.

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THE MONKEY PRINCE: about as complete as he’s gonna get.

the monkey prince puppet now has arms that have been constructed by toby - the forearms are paper-mache on sticks of dowel to act as rods extending past the ‘elbow’, while the upper arms are fabric covered in raffia.

pictured with the crown he’ll eventually take from the evil king.

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THE WATER DEMON: now with a ‘body’.

toby’s been handling dying both grass and a large sheet of fabric green on his own, but i joined him to do the classic looping of raffia onto rope and then we had to figure how to attach the raffia to the fabric and then the fabric to the dome. the grass-skirts of raffia-on-rope have been safety-pinned to the fabric with allowance left for overlap and then the fabric has been aggressively duct-taped and stapled to the inside of the dome, as we’ve been lacking in really strong adhesives.

the water demon is pretty much done!

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minor edits...

of course, monkey royalty needs a crown. first image: toby with the monkey head before he had a torso with a placeholder crown made of paper - we’re both pretty solid on wanting the crown to be long and tall, where the wild things are style. second image: the cardboard crown, as created by toby, who was initially unhappy with it. third image: the monkey with torso and collar of raffia, with the cardboard crown now with a modified paint job to make it match a little more with the way i have been painting the various masks/puppet pieces i have made on my own.

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ADDING THE HAIR TO THE KING.

working collaboratively again, with raffia...again. modelling the mask is toby, who came up with the idea to stab holes into the back of the mask and run a length of rope through it, and then, as we have been doing for the rest of the time, loop the raffia around the rope in bunches until the appearance of hair has been created.

we also trimmed the raffia a little to give him a slightly neater haircut, and i used a bit of hot glue to firmly attach the rope to the back of the mask all the way around.

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CONSTRUCTING THE MONKEY PRINCE:

splitting off from collaborative work again, i’ve been tasked with making the head and torso for the monkey prince. pictured above is a scribbly page of construction notes, most of which were done by toby, but some of which were done by me. springing on from my initial test monkey, the pinata monkey, i created a new puppet with a hollow head in which there is a handle, so that the hand of the puppeteer is mostly concealed when operating the puppet. the ‘neck’ is just a piece of fabric ‘rope’ attaching the head to the torso.

me & toby plan to add raffia to his neck and arms so that he is not so drastically different in appearance to his ‘father’ the evil king.

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MORE WORKING ON THE WATER DEMON.

another pretty much full days work on this dome, this time adding colours, again trying to be inspired by the colours used in the digital watercolour collage drawings done by toby, my project partner. for his previous projects toby has also created a lot of little horned creatures, and i have tried to channel the way he makes gradient-coloured horns for them by making my horns for this dome multicoloured. i also tried to get a bit fancy adding ‘shading’ underneath where the horns attach and around the eyes, which unfortunately i glued in the wrong place on the first attempt and had to re-attach.

otherwise, he’s basically finished! and ready to be taken to tutorial, though he’s still awaiting some sort of a body.

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MORE WORKING ON THE WATER DEMON.

another full days work on this dome puppet, constructing the horns (again using my trusty newspaper+tape method) however instead of paper mache, i have wrapped the horns in yarn and covered them in PVA glue so that tomorrow they’ll be ready to be painted, along with the body, which has now been painted white to conceal the newsprint.

the last picture features me, for scale. overall, i think this dome is my largest creation yet, springboarding off from the ‘keith’ character mask i created for the authorship project - i’m pretty proud of the development from a flat-backed mask that i had to build a ‘helmet’ attachment to the back of as compared to the dome built from scratch to be entirely 3D.

but it’s also really rather heavy.

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MORE WORKING ON THE WATER DEMON.

pictured here is the mouth of the water demon, created with string wrapped around the lip shape to give the dome an extra texture for a little bit more visual/tactile pizazz. since the tone of the story we have been basing our work on is a little dark, i imagine the final look of the demon will be in its angry state, however, i think there is really something terribly appealing about the weird goofy grin he gets when the mouth is attached upside-down. for now, i definitely won’t be gluing the mouth down permanently.

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GOING BACK TO WORKING ON THE WATER DEMON.

after an extended break of a couple of weeks of not working on the dome, i have gone back onto working on the dome with fresh eyes. no longer simply a half-sphere, i have built up the front of the snout and added more bulk to generally smooth out the shape of the demon. i kept the existing teardrop-shaped eyes i had made earlier, but threw out the large flat teardrop nose, and created a third eye to go in the middle.

toby drew the shape of the horns on the first image of the second row, and sent me the selection of inspiring imagery on the top row of images, and for the sake of speed and ease i create a simplified design incorporating big lips, pointy teeth, three eyes and of course, horns. the top middle image is especially important as we have decided we are no longer going to use my idea of making the demon chinese dragon style, (horizontal) and instead will try and create something like in the image above, with a long vertical body of grass going down, which we will use more raffia on and the use of that raffia will help keep the water demon puppet ‘on theme’ with the other characters that we have also used raffia in the designs of.

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MONKEY MASKS

getting a feel for how the masks would look on a person... i may have been silly with adding camera filters. i have gone for two potential moods - fierce and angry with a fanged mouth for a truly aggressive monkey king, or (what i hope is) a slightly unsettling wide grin with red-yellow eyes to suggest a more affably evil creep-factor. 

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MAKING SOME MONKEY FACES.

more images from my adventures in making monkey king masks. when i brought these to toby’s house the next day, he preferred the yellow one, and since i have no preference, the yellow one is the one we will be using.

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MAKING SOME MONKEY FACES.

working individually here, and basing these faces off my previous drawings. i have created two fairly large mask faces on carboard and begun to build them up using newspaper and papier-mache, and then adding colour using acrylic paint. in an effort to keep the idea of collaboration going, i have been trying to paint using colours similar to what my project partner toby has been using in his design illustrations and applying them to my own designs.