Animate The Inanimate
For this brief, we were directed to create a model using everyday objects. I initially wanted to use this assignment to make the model for one of my characters for my ‘1 Minute Film’.
At first, I used pieces of foam and the tools in the workshop to make the basic feature of the face of my character, Will. However, I realised just how difficult it would be to make a detailed face, knowing my time constraints I decided that I wouldn't make this character for this particular assignment.
From there I used modelling clay to make a small bear, as one of my characters is a bear. I found the clay difficult to work with, I’ve never used it before. I decided to make a small wire armature that I then layered clay over the top of. Adding detail to the bears face and allowing movement of the limbs was very difficult.
I got two teddy bears of different sizes from a charity shop, following the advice of Steve, I chose to use the smaller of the two to use for my model. This would allow a smaller and more easily manipulated armature to be used within the bear. Using a fabric bear would allow for easy movement opposed to the difficulty of using clay.
After removing the bears costume, I cut the bear open, removed the stuffing and removed the bears face from the rest of the head..
Using wire, I hade an armature for inside of the bear. I attached metal washers to were the hands and feet would be when inside the teddy so that I could use magnets to stabilise the bear when recording. I experimented with using single, doubled and triple twisted wires for the armature. I used a small gauge wire that was flexible enough to allow the movement that I wanted in my model. However, the repeated actions would likely break the wire inside the bear and cause issues while filming. Double twisting the wire allowed the same flexibility and increased the durability of the wires, and triple twisting the wire increased the durability even more. I chose the use triple twisted wire as I wanted to avoid having the make multiple repairs to my model.
Using foam pieces, I used the sander to shape foam blocks, allowing them to fit within the bears arms, torso and legs. The wires were pushed through the appropriate parts of the foam to create a solid armature within the bear, with stuffing surrounding the parts to cushion the bear.
I removed the false eyes from the original bears face and hot glued them to the foam face. At this point, I also hot glued the remaining section of fabric from the bears head onto the back of the foam head. I used hot glue to secure the wires within the base of the head, and sewn the bear together to complete the model.
Issues: - After I had glued the head onto the body, I realised that there was too much visible space between the ‘neck’ of the bear and the ‘head’. Using a short scrap of fabric left over from the head of the brea, I glued it around the neck to obscure the wires going into the base of the head.
- After I’d completed my model, I took it into the stop motion studio and realised that I’d put too much stuffing around the washers in the feet of the model, this prevented the magnets used to keep the model stable from working properly, resulting in the model falling easily. I unpicked the thread of the bears heels and removed the majority of the stuffing to allow the magnets and washers to work properly to stabilise the bear.