Thursday

Earned Excitement

16/05/12

Today I finally finished animation. Very exciting!

First of all I had a shot where the characters passed behind a tree with some nice mushroomy growths that cast a shadow on to them, so I set up the camera with some card and cut the shape into it using the Stop Motion Pro live feed as a guide.


This shot also called for the wolf to walk up on to a step, so rather than tilting the camera like I did last time, I set up something slightly better using some blocks of wood that I drilled holes in to so that I could tie-down.
 I also used some CineFoil to get a nice dappling effect.
 It was a good thing  only needed my wooden blocks for one shot... turns out balsa wood wasn't the durable material it should have been. Who knew.

With that shot done I set about doing a dangerous shot. Dangerous because I needed to create a rig to allow my puppet to be lifted off the ground as it jumps over a tree stump. My original rigging points didn't work at all and snapped off when I was testing them (for some reason I decided to do this once the fur was all on so repairing them was impossible).

My solution was to use foam-covered aluminium wire mega-twists (as seen at the top of this post) and hot glue some metal rods into the end of them. I then used a power drill and made holes in the front and back balsa wood sections so the rigs could slot in to them.

Other than potentially destroying my puppet for a 2 second shot, the other reason I left this shot until last was because the rigging points would create a hole in the fur, which wouldn't be visible in this shot but, of course, the wolf was facing the opposite direction in some shots, so I didn't want there to be big gaping holes visible.
Diiiiiieeeeee!

Weeeeeee!




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