Welcome to Part 1 of my 4 Part Stop Motion Animation blog post series!
I usually don’t post the work that I do at school here, I maintain this blog for personal or professional projects. But because the project we recently completed is basically one large aspect I want to do ever since realizing over a year ago that I didn’t in fact want to be a freelance illustrator, I want to share with you this experience
My professor wanted us not only for it to be a short stop motion animated film, but it had to have a character that both moved and talked. We didn’t have to create a puppet but it was certainly on the list of materials to use. I seeing this as an opportunity to finally start learning how to make a puppet, fully committed to learning. Making my own armature, clothes and or course puppet. Before this project I was hemming and hawing around actually making a puppet, I did actually do some puppet clothes, but I was still nervous about making mistakes on my puppet. I kept finding ways to not start like thinking I needed to learn more about different types of puppets, armatures, and clays.
So when this project fell into my hands, I just wanted to relax not seek for perfect and just learn how to create. I believe it’s what I needed.
When we got down to the actual project, I hadn’t really thought of a script. I had multiple ideas but none that were fully formed. I started creating my puppet anyway and brainstorming while actually making.
I used Claytoons since my professor recommended it to me. It’s a non-hardening clay and at .99 cents each, it’s a steal. I bought a pack of four at Utrecht for $3 and change.
All I knew of my project was that I wanted it to have just one character a man and so I started on the head. I believe that as visual artists we tend to be very strong in more than one medium once we try our hand at it so it definitely wasn’t hard to create the head.
As much as I wanted to relax and just learn instead of committing to being precise and detailed, I didn’t want it to look rudimentary so I did try with the eyes instead of sticking pieces of clay on top of the head.
And that concludes Part 1!
Happy Wednesday.
