Working with the Seasons

This past weekend, my mom and her partner, John, came by to insulate the garage / studio where I’m doing all this work on the film.  The studio walls are insulated, but the garage door wasn’t — it had huge gaps all around its edges, and the door itself is very thin.  I noticed during the summer that, at a certain time of day when the sun hits it, the door acts as a heater.  It’s painted black on the outside, and since it’s so poorly insulated, the heat just pours right through it.

Soon, it’ll be winter.  I’m a little excited to think of how well the type of work I’m doing is fitting in with the change of seasons, and how it will feel to be in a dark room animating while it’s cold and snowy outside.  Spring and summer were for building and creating things, coming up with ideas and designs, and growing the film.   Now it’s fall, the air is getting chilly, and it seems like time to withdraw into a (hopefully) warm cocoon.

Mom & John with work in progress, then the final curtain.

First, the 2x4s and fibreglass go up…  The last of the door windows is closed in… and then the whole thing is covered by plastic, tape, and finally a heavy purple curtain.  What’s behind the curtain — no wizard, just these pink guts of glass…

I put up the newly framed James Jean poster in the corner of the studio, for inspiration.  The image even has cabbages in it!  I saw him give a talk with Paul Pope at a Beguiling-sponsored comic event last year.  (Beguiling is a popular local comic store…  here is the poster, close up.)  Love his work.

Yesterday was the first day in the studio since the garage wall has been insulated…  what a difference!  Not that it’s that cold yet, but the soundproofing provided by that 6″ thick, R20 candy floss is pretty amazing.  The space is totally cocoon-like now.  Ready for winter…  almost ready for shooting, too.

Making Rare Earth Magnetic Feet

I read a few threads over on stopmotionanimation.com about tie-downs vs. magnets (if you search “magnets” on the message board, over 100 threads come up — it’s quite a debate!)  I also chatted with a couple stopmo animators about their preference for magnets.  Many people on the stopmo forum prefer tie-downs…  though I respect their advice, I decided not to go that route.

The main reason for my choice of using rare earth magnets can be explained by this one picture:

Not the metal button shank… but the floor.  I put a lot of work into the floor of my set, and there’s simply no way I’m tearing it apart with little holes.  I thought of using magnets only when you can see the floor in a shot, and using tie-downs for everything else on scrap pieces of wood clamped to the floor, but what’s the point of overcomplicating things?  In the end I just put my faith in the magnet system.  I can’t be 100% sure that it will work, but the animator friends that I spoke with use (and love) rare earth magnets, and gave me solutions to some of the problems raised on stopmoanimation.com debates.  As a safeguard I also built the puppets to have a removable bolt in their upper backs, in case they need upward support while walking (and I’m pretty sure they will).

Anyhoo, here’s what I’m doing with the feet:

I used:

  1. 5-minute epoxy
  2. 1/16″ armature wire
  3. very flexible and durable 22-gauge silver wire, used for jewelry making
  4. 1/8″ x 1/8″ and 1/4″ x 1/10″ rare earth magnets (one of each per foot)
  5. 1/4″ diameter heat-shrink tubing pieces

I got a whole bunch of magnets from Lee Valley.  They have a great rare earth collection, as well as a handy guide to using them.  (Those things are strong! You can actually hurt yourself handling the larger magnets… as I found out.  So it helps to read the guide!)  I used 2 magnets in each tiny foot — hoping that Sabela will still be able to bend her foot in the middle while walking.  There’s one 1/8″ by 1/8″ magnet in her toe, and one 1/4″ by 1/10″ magnet in her heel.  Her feet are so small that there’s only about a 2mm gap between the 2 magnets, so it might be tough to bend her foot in the end, but at least it will still bend a little.  I might need a shot where she gets up on tip-toes, so I’d really like her foot to have some flexibility.

  1. I formed the armature wire into a loop in the middle, shaping the equal ends smooth and flat.  The loop is just large enough for the 1/8 x 1/8 inch magnet to fit into, and the entire piece of wire, when folded in half like this, is about 3 inches longer than the length of the puppet’s leg.  Then I epoxy the magnet in place at the end of the loop, making sure it’s facing the right way (all magnets need to be consistent with their direction, so they pull rather than repel each other.)  When the epoxy’s dry, I squeeze the loop tightly around the magnet with pliers.  The magnet is flush with one side of the armature loop — this flush part will be the base of the foot.
  2. Then I bend the wire at a 90º angle in the shape of the foot.  I measure the length of the foot and test to make sure the plaster mold can close around it before continuing.
  3. The second magnet gets epoxied to the heel of the foot, fitting into the corner groove made by the wire.  Again, the magnetic force has to be facing the same way as the small magnet that’s in the toe.  (I usually put dots on the “tops” of the magnets with marker so that I know which way’s which.)  Epoxying this one in place is really tricky — the magnet will want to flip over onto the other magnet.  So basically I need to hold it firmly in place by hand until the epoxy is dry… which can take a while.  There’s no way to clamp it, unless you have a non-metallic clamp… all the clamps I have attract the magnet, making it impossible to clamp in the right position.  (If I figure out a better way, I’ll update this post…)
  4. I then cut a piece of the heat-shrink tubing to the length of the foot, and slide it over the foot.  This is extra insurance that the magnets are held firmly in place.  I heat up the tubing on the stove, turning the burner on high and holding the foot up close to it until the tubing shrinks down to a tight fit over the foot.  This stuff is great, because it stays flexible and allows the foot to bend, but is strong enough to hold the magnets in place.

So with the 2 magnets in place in each foot, the legs will stand up (even with such tiny feet!) on their 1″ x 1/8″ magnetic disc pedestal.  I’ll do another post on how I finish off the legs, and make the magnetic base, another time…  Oops, the 22 gauge fine wire listed above gets used in the next stage, when I add more wires to the legs.

Moleskine Art & Radiohead

Here’s some interesting artwork done using photo transfers in a moleskine book.  I enjoy his architectural stuff, and the technique he uses to transfer images, sometimes leaving elements blank:

Hollis Brown Thornton & How He Does This.

Also, this Radiohead video is kinda old news, but somehow these images haven’t left my mind… it’s pretty amazing to hear how they created House of Cards without a camera, and I love how they intentionally interfered with the laser signals.  I would like to do something like this WITH a camera, using stop motion, somehow…  To come up with this kind of ethereal, mutable sense of space.  It’s magical.

Radiohead:  House of Cards

The Big Picture of Little Theatres

I’ve been working on this project full time since June, so I’m starting to become aware of the phases I go through while working on longer-term projects.  One thing that’s interesting about taking on such a huge project essentially by myself is that I have to stay extremely focussed on very small things for a sustained stretch of time.  The attention to detail, in all stages of the production, is what makes a film.  And stop motion is nothing but details.  In building miniature sets, it’s the details that make them authentic and interesting and lived-in.  In making puppets, the details turn them into living creatures, and make them functional — one slip and they’ll be falling apart in no time.  In animation, well, all movements are being broken down to 24 images per second, so one can spend hours deliberating and creating a second’s worth of motion.  Details, details.

So, my vision becomes stunted.  I can only focus on tiny things so intently for so long.  I need to step back and breathe every now and then.  Writing this blog helps, but I need to write more, to stand back further.  Perhaps work on the animatic for a while.

Yesterday I switched from making the tiny hands to designing the final set of the film.  It’s a dining room.  I have a solid idea for it, but have to organize the details:  colour palettes, structure, etc.

But that’s not stepping far back enough.

Today I need to think about, and write about, why I’m making this film.

Helpfully coinciding with this phase — Erín Moure, the poet on whose work the film is based, was in town last night, to give a reading at a local art gallery.  This reading was just what I needed.  A door has opened and I’m staring back into the bigger picture.

She had told me her reasons for writing in other languages before.  Little Theatres was written in 2003, following the US invasion of Iraq.  Watching George Bush talk of the weapons of mass destruction, and other phantoms of political jargon, made her not want to speak or think in English anymore.  English is the language wars are waged in; noone has ever waged a war in Galician.  So she went to Galicia for a while, to live in a different language, and write Little Theatres.

The Big Theatres, she says, are those of war and commerce.  George Bush speeches are written in English.  Advertisements are blaring in English.  The language becomes associated with everything that’s loud out there in the world, everything that has a “mass media” voice.  It becomes mindless chatter in the big voices of the everyday.  The Little Theatres are where where blades of grass speak.  Where a little girl making a soup out of cabbage is very important.  Where the internal voice is important, in its pre-language stage.

Erín said that she used to work at Via Rail, in the customer service department, listening to people yell and swear about train problems.  The way to talk to someone who’s yelling is to speak very softly and slowly, so that they can only listen.  Listening calms people down, while responding with a loud voice keeps them angry.  If the antidote to anger is softness, perhaps the antidote to war is something similar.

I don’t think paying attention to detail, to the small matters of everyday life, is a withdrawal from the world at all.  It’s a refocussing.  Read Vandana Shiva, Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, or (especially) Sharon Astyk for a while and you’ll see how the personal is political.  There are no solid lines between inner and outer, between domestic and public.  We’ve drawn (and redrawn) the lines arbitrarily.  Pay attention to where your food and water are coming from, and you’ll see how the simplest thing like the details of cooking a meal is of vast importance.  The simple things in life are not so simple.  Socially, politically, globally, these tiny details really matter.

So, in the end, taking a break, stepping away from the tiny puppet hands and set elements for a while to look at the bigger picture will take me right back, full circle, to the little picture.

Last night Erín said,

If you don’t understand Galician, it sounds like water.

In the end, I want this film to be like watching, and listening to, water.  Not that it’ll be impossible to understand or anything — there will be animated text to translate the Galician v/o — but I’m hoping that soft, fluid voice of life and simplicity and essentialness shines through beyond anything else.

Two Hands, Two Font Finds

One day I want to make a robotic syle of puppet, just so I can use these hands as they are here.  I love how the wires look like tendons.

Next these’ll get dipped in liquid latex and painted.

Also, I don’t know how many of you stopmotioners get excited about fonts, but I do.  These guys fell into my inbox in the past week or so:

Compendium at Veer.com

Handmade, by Misprinted Type, at MyFonts

Aren’t they luscious?

Charts and Graphs, Odds and Ends

A couple of lovely friends, Parki and Kim, spent their Saturday morning helping me out with various  film-related things.  Their Saturday morning!  They arrived bright and early, fueled by lots of coffee, the crisp fall air,  and the desire to make miniature things.  Kim helped with a task I had originally thought of as tedious, but that’s now being called meticulous.  I think that sounds much better.

She helped me out by making all these tiny fingers for Sabela.   These are electrical wires casings, gutted of their fine wires and replaced with jewelry wire.  Tiny glass seed beads act as joints.

Parki wired up and spraypainted these spotlights.  They’ll have tiny functioning incandescent lightbulbs in them, and he’ll eventually attach them all to a dimmer so they can be animated.

The spotlights themselves are made of metal bottlecaps, wood, and some heavy card for the barn doors.

Here are Sabela’s backup legs, unpainted, with magnetic feet, standing on a pretty metal box.

And here are the tasks I’m facing right now.  I thought I’d put it together in a chart so I can keep track of the progress.  It seems a little daunting at the moment.

I’m using the same molds for the legs and head of Abigail, who’s Sabela’s little sister.  They should look a bit alike, anyway.  Liberdade is the Mom (she now has a name!), and Xosé Luís is the Dad.

I’m making backup parts for all the puppets.  Hopefully this will be enough; if not, I guess I can make more while shooting, though that’s obviously not ideal.

The main character is going to (of course) be featured the most, and is going to be moving around more than anyone else.  She’s the only character who will be walking, so I figured she’d need lots of extra backup legs for sure.  I think she’ll be in the film for about 1.5 minutes, at most…  The other characters will be on for about 45 seconds.  The 3 “side” characters are all sitting, and mostly moving their upper bodies.

I wonder if this is going to be enough backup parts?…

How to Cast a Head: Pre-Stage 1: The Eyes

OK, let’s backtrack a bit.  I realize I launched into the puppet casting without explaining the most important part:  the eyes.

Here’s what the inside of the Sabela mold looks like.  When I made the mold, I put straightened-out bits of paperclips in her eyeball beads.  Paperclips work well because they’re the right size for these particular beads, and they’re made of really stiff wire.  They’re sticking straight out, like in Xosé Luís’ eyes in the previous post.

After the mold was done, the original plastecine sculpt removed, I carefully trimmed the paperclips down so that they’re just slightly shorter than the hole of the bead when it sits on it.  Just so there’s no wire overhang when the beads are put in place.  I.e. the beads I’m using for the eyes are 7mm in diametre.  So I trimmed the wires down so they’re sticking out about 6mm inside the head.

Then, when it’s time to cast the head, this is how I begin:

  1. Line the tiny edges of the eyes — the eyelids, top and bottom — with liquid latex, filling up all the crevices, but trying to leave the eyeball part clean.  This step allows you to paint the tiny folds clearly before the eyeballs go in, because once they’re in, it’s very hard to get into those areas.
  2. While the latex is still wet, insert a placeholder bead (these are exactly the same size beads used throughout, and for the final eyeballs) over each wire.
  3. Fill the holes of the beads with a tiny bit of plastecine, and level the plastecine off with the shape of the bead.  Basically this eliminates the hole so that latex doesn’t seep into the bead and lock it in place in its socket.
  4. Brush more liquid latex over the entire bead, creating an eye socket.  I like to brush latex all over the inner face at this point as well, just to make sure the details of the nose and mouth are firmly coated, and to build up those parts a bit thicker.

Let that all cure for a few hours.  When dry, repeat, building up 3 or 4 layers of latex.  In the end, it will look something like the picture above.

That’s it!  Once the eye sockets have cured, you’re ready to go on to Stage 1, lining the inner mold with liquid latex.

Zooming forward to beyond the end of stage 2, which would be stage 3, I suppose; after the cast is finished, foam filling and all, and the head is totally painted and ready to go — this is when the placeholder bead is carefully removed, and the painted eyeball is put in place.  Before I take the eyeball out though I carefully stretch it open a bit and dust a little talcum powder inside the eye socket, just to be sure the eyesocket doesn’t stick to itself on the inside and get pinched shut.  Once the placeholders are taken out, I put a bit more talcum powder inside the empty sockets, and brush it around… The powder helps the final eyeballs articulate more easily.  Pop the final eyeballs in…  Voilà!

Xosé Luís Begins… and Friends.

I’ve started to make the mold for the Dad — and he now has a name!  Xosé Luís.  Named after Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, a famous Galician writer, whom Erín suggested… I just like his name; hopefully I’m not doing the writer a huge injustice by borrowing his name for this little character.

But here he is, in progress, with half his mold curing:

So, basically he has shards of a paperclip coming out of his eyes, the poor fellow.  But this is only to hold his eyeballs in place when he is eventually cast.  Very helpful proxies and guides.

Also, I brought Sabela home today from my friend Alli’s.  She has finished her costume, which looks absolutely amazing.

ALSO, I had lunch today with my friend Loretta.  Loretta is an amazing hairdresser, and offered to cut and style the characters’ hair.  HOW GREAT IS THIS?  I feel so lucky today, and most days, to know such talented and kind people.  Just this week I have friends helping out on the lighting (Parki, who makes awesome art deco lights and other cool stuff in his spare time), is wiring up all the practical lighting of the set — footlights, spotlights, etc. for the theatre…  Alli is the talented purse designer & sewer who is making all these gorgeous costumes… and Loretta, the most talented stylist I know, cutting hair.  Woot!

How to Cast a Head: Stage 2

(You can read How to Cast a Head:  Stage 1 here.)

(This is part of the process of casting parts for Sabela, the main character of the film.)

I’ve heard a few pro puppet-makers poo-pooing Urethane foam.  Apparently latex foam is far superior in its texture, density, air bubbliness, etc.  But it seems like it takes months, or even years, to learn how to use it!  You have to keep detailed logs on the humidity, room temperature, and how they affect the mixing times and gel quantities.  You have to go through many, many trial and error batches.  And with each batch you have to juggle 4-component chemical mixtures, adding each one at specific times in specific measurements.  Plus 4 hours of baking time per batch!  Stop motion animation takes some extreme patience, but for some reason I just don’t have the patience to be a mad scientist mixing batch after batch of noxious chemicals.

So I decided to use the inferior foam.  Which, in my opinion, isn’t really that far inferior.  It has its problems, but I’ve found workarounds.  I’m very pleased with this technique.

The down side to urethane is that it can possibly sometimes shrivel a bit.  Not sure why.  Also, the bubbles are not fine enough to pick up all the details of the mold.  My solution to both problems is described in the stage 1 process:  line the mold with liquid latex.  The details remain, the casting doesn’t shrink, and everything works out great!

So, without further ado, here is how I cast the urethane foam head for Sabela.

I use Smooth-On Flex-Foam-it! III Urethane Foam.  It’s a 2-component foam that mixes in 30 seconds, pours as a gel, and foams in the mold in about 1 minute, to expand 15 times its original volume.  It cures in 30 minutes.  Easy!  There are various densities of this foam… III is the lightest, airiest one.

To make this head, I only used 1/2 oz. of Part A and 1 oz. of Part B, mixing it vigorously in a hummus container used only for this purpose.  (Clearly I eat a lot of hummus!)  I also have a plastic palette knife dedicated to the purpose of mixing these components, because this stuff is messy — it sticks to everything.

There is a very small window — after the 30 seconds of mixing — to get this stuff in the mold.  That window is about 20 seconds or so.  I like that the foam spends its first moments as a gel so it can be poured, rather than injected.  Note that the hole at the top of the mold has to be fairly wide — I had to carve this one wider, otherwise the gel would cure on its way down.  It’s a 1 cm deep by 4 cm wide rectangle, approximately, carved out below the shoulders.

It rises like a soufflé…  and smells somehow sweet, like mirangue.

30 minutes or so later, I peel away the foam from the outside.  It is impossible to totally remove it all from the plaster, so a couple coats of release agent is a good idea for the innards of the mold, just in case any creeps in.  (This happens in stage 1, of course.  Hopefully I mentioned that already.)  The latex lining should keep it from sticking to the inner mold, though, overall.

Carefully peel away the mold parts…

And here she is!  She looks a little mottled because the latex is thicker in some areas than others… which isn’t a big deal.  Once she’s painted and the seams and eyes are cleaned up, she’ll look great.

P.S.

Here she is (mostly) painted and cleaned up!

* An unrelated side note:  I’ve found out that this blog looks horrible on PCs.  The type is ginormous and the header is too big.  Sorry about that, for anyone who’s reading it on a PC… I’m not a whiz at CSS, and have no idea why it’s looking so crap.  I could put “site looks great on a 1680 x 1050 monitor using Mac OSX and Firefox” at the header because that’s what I’m using but I realize that’s not practical so I’ll have to figure out how to fix it, eventually…

Puppet #3

Still no names yet, but they’re coming.

Today I sculpted the Mom character — Sabela’s mom.  All pictures are clickable for enlarging.

I used the Medium grade plastecine, and some pretty basic wooden sculpting tools.

Drilled a hole into some scrap wood, just wide enough for this copper tubing.  Epoxied it in place.  Then used some coat hanger wire (for its stiffness) and armature wire (for its armatureness) to form a rough head.  Filled it with crumpled up aluminum foil, and roughly coated it with some plastecine.  Then roughed out the basic facial shapes:  eye sockets, cheekbones, chin, nose.  I don’t get too fussy at this point.

The eye sockets that were roughed in above were too close together — I want her to resemble Sabela somewhat, and Sabela has quite far-set eyes.  So I had to pull the eyeballs out a couple times until the placement was level and well-spaced.  Then rolled up tiny bits of plastecine and worked them around the eyeballs, creating lids for them.  (Please excuse the nail polish — I NEVER wear nail polish but just did that this past weekend for fun.  The colour is called Disco!)

The eye sockets needed to be deeper, so I carved away a bit of clay around the eyes.  Then tweaked away at all the shapes, adding definition here and there, and smoothing things out.  Also added tiny lips, and finally, her shoulders.

Here they are!  Sabela’s Mom and Dad.  I won’t make the plaster molds for these guys until they have names.  I’ve become a little superstitious about that.  Puppets are much more cooperative when they’re named; I think you really have to respect them as though they were living beings, and treat them carefully, as strange as it may sound!