Take a look at how I created my first Stop Motion animation puppet, from the initial character sketches, to the sculpting of the maquette, to the sewing of the chef's coat.
Why howdy there!
Welcome to my first blog post.
In this post I will be taking you through the process I took to create my first Stop Motion puppet, Pippin the Merry Baker!
So come on and take a gander at my puppet creation...
For our second year Stop Motion module assignment at SAE Institute, the animation college I attend in South Africa, a fellow student and myself had to create a concept for a short stop motion animation (2 minutes in length). We decided to create a story about an old baking couple, Mary and Pippin Baker, who wake up merrily one morning to discover that they've got a massive order due to be delivered that evening! In their rush to get everything done in time, they fumble around until they break out into a food fight. Eventually they regain their cool after realising that they're just wasting time, and get back to finishing the order (it's short but sweet, like the life expectancy of a choc chip biscuit!).
And that's the plot, so let's get into the making of my chosen character, Pippin!
Character Design
Here are some of the initial character designs for Pippin:
Maquette-making
All of the materials used in the sculpting of our maquettes were provided to us by the college.
Materials included:
A block of compressed recycled wood (cut into four 12,2 x 15,5cm rectangles)
A coil of aluminum wire
A sculpting set, and
1kg of Matt Daniel wax-based sculpting clay
Method:
The method taken was one based off of what could be learnt from attending college virtually, at home. I see that I could've done better, but hopefully with more practice I can reach the skill level I wish to be at.
Anyways, on with the sculpting!
This was the pose I went with for the maquette:
So first off, a hole had to be drilled through the centre of the wood block (I didn't have access to a drill at the time, so instead I made use of a hammer and a small nail moving onto bigger ones to increase the size of the hole). A medium-sized crater had to then be dug/drilled out at the one end of the hole. This is for the wire to be coiled and glued within the wood to have the block sit flat.
A twisted strand of aluminum wire was then thread through this hole, with the shorter end sticking out through the crater's side. The longer end of the wire would be about the same height as the character, making the very top slightly shorter than the actual character's full head height. The shorter end was coiled into the crater:
Here you can just see Pippin's turnaround sheet, which helped me to determine how to pose the wire from his right leg, bending it at the waist, and going up through the spine to the mid-way point of the head:
The arms and left leg were then measure out, attached to the lone spine with smaller aluminum wire, and posed:
A wrapped ball of newspaper (Pippin's belly) was placed onto the front of the skeleton with masking tape:
The newspaper was then wrapped with tinfoil:
Using the smaller, finer aluminum wire I bent it into the shape of one of Pippin's 3-fingered hands:
I did the same for his other hand, which was in the shape of a fist, so here I used my hand for reference:
Here it is attached to his bod:
Strike that pose!
Aaaand from the back:
Adding more tinfoil to create volume:
Fleshing him out with the wax-based clay:
Adding the clothing details:
Trying to make his face (you can see in the actual puppet that his eyes came out differently):
Final touches - Hat and buttons (the feet were completed but the maquette is yet to be picked up from campus for a proper photoshoot!):
And that's the maquette, now onto the puppet!!
Pippin's Puppet
NOTE: this is not a professionally crafted puppet. All students had to figure out how to construct their respective puppets according to their characters and what materials they chose to use. For the Merry Baker puppets, they were not particularly stable, nor too flexible (quite rigid, they were!). This was also due to the tight space of time we had to work in in order to actually get to filming.
Materials:
Aluminum wire
Air-drying clay
Styrofoam
Masking Tape
White glue
Acrylic paint
Watercolour paint
Process:
Pippin's skeleton was constructed much in the same way as his maquette, except for the piece of wood he stood on, or should I say stood in?
With the skeleton constructed, a styrofoam ball was cut in half and positioned on his front. A small block of styrofoam was cut to serve as the shape of his head, which was then covered in a thin layer of air-drying clay:
Once the thin layer of air-drying clay had dried on his head, his eye sockets were carved in and a round ball of clay was stuck to his face for the nose:
His body was wrapped in cotton, for a soft, fleshy-like volume that would appear beneath the clothing:
Front:
Side:
Back:
To secure the cotton in place, I created a solution consisting of white glue and water mixed together to create a watery glue paste that I gently brushed onto the cottoned body with a soft brush, so as not to pick up the cotton.
I sculpted little clay kneecaps which I attached to the front of the legs once the cotton had dried:
The feet were also sculpted out of the clay, with a piece of thin wire going through the heel, and one joining the heel to the point of the foot:
To create Pippin's clothing, his body was first wrapped in clingfilm and then in masking tape (an easy way of creating tailored clothing):
The seams were marked out on the masking tape (while still on him) and then the masking tape and clingfilm were cut off along these seams. This was done for both the chef's coat and his pants:
The cut-out masking tape pattern was traced around on fabric. A seam-allowance was added to each piece to allow for room to sew. Here is his coat being sewn up:
The finished coat, front of:
Back:
I didn't have enough time to figure how to work in the collar of the coat!
I also didn't have enough time (or experience) to completely figure out how to work out the pattern for the pants, so this is the rather messy and strange result of the front (she said, embarrassed):
The side:
And the back:
I had to sew the top of the pants to Pippin's body, through the cotton, in order for them to actually stay on:
The hat was a bit tricky to get around too, but here it be:
The hands were made using the same method as the maquette's hands, of using wire to shape the fingers. For the flesh, I wrapped cotton around the palm and the fingers with the watery glue mixture. Once it was dry, I mixed together a skin ton with acrylic paint and painted the hand:
I think another two more layers of cotton would have made the digits more round and fleshy.
A finished Pippin!
And there he is in frozen action on set, along with Mary in the left corner of the camera phone:
Thank you coming to take a look at my first attempt at creating a stop motion puppet and maquette! I can see myself improving from here, as I have learnt many things during this project. I hope to have more time in the future to work on a fully developed and rendered character puppet (there are already some designs on the way...)
Stick around for more puppet-making adventures!
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