One Year Later.

 

 Okay! So what's been going on? I'm still working at it! What you see up above is a completed set #2. My friends made all the walls and floor and I built the surrounding structure, painted it and dressed it up. We started this set first because it only films with Pel and no one else. Since Pel was 3/4 done at this point, I could get the correct dimensions for it and tell my friends to start!

Set #1 is actually almost done. I just need to add a chair and a few more set dressing pieces. I just can't complete it without finishing Alexander, and for some reason, I'm just not in the mood to start him yet. He's been designed in Zbrush and Rhino. I've started soldering the armature together, but I just can't find the interest in building him. So I started on the Guardian instead. She's a lot more interesting since she lights up and is printed out of clear parts. I have her head 3/4 printed. I've been instagramming the whole process.

As usual, I'm not happy with my progress, but Maria reminded me that a professional stop motion film takes 30 or more people several years to complete with financial backing etc. I'm just doing this on my free time in my bedroom with the help of three other people. Once I make this chair for the first set, I can actually start filming the first shot of the movie!!

I still need to re-cast Pel's voice actor. The guy I got really can't act or doesn't seem comfortable trying. The guy who did Alexander's lines nailed it pretty much on the first try!

Once I have more filmed, or anything filmed, I'd like to look into getting someone to make music for it as well. I still really want to do this! Every now and then I fear I'll lose interest. I haven't yet, but the motivation has dwindled recently. 

By the way, Instagram is really the best way to see progress on this project. Just look for 'Sculptwerks'.

The fire in which we burn

 

I'm a good 1/2 through building the puppet of Pel. It's all designed in Rhino and sculpted in Zbrush. I used the measurements in Rhino to sodder together the brass armature. I've 3D printed most of Pel's pieces. I've printed and redesigned 7 different Pel Heads, each one getting progressively better and better. 

As of right now, his legs are too heavy so I'd like to go back, redesign them and reprint them so that they have the same dimensions without all the mass. I pretty much printed  them as solid pieces. The tail was printed in 4 pieces, totally hollow! They're all glued together, but they need to be sanded and a piece of armature wire needs to be mounted within.

I still have to zbrush all the mouths, torch, fire sequences, and hands for Pel. I also need to finalize his clothes and then hand fabricate them.... I thought each puppet would take month, but each might take 3 months!!! So I guess this being a one year project is out the window. 

I'm going to meet up with a friend this weekend and have him start making tiny books.

I've lost a week because I've been working nightshift for AOA out at Magic Kingdom. I've also been spending the days working on Props for Disney's Cruise Line. I'm grateful for the work and the money! But I feel bad about my project being put on hold. 

Pel and Alexander

 

So it's the end of February and what have I accomplished? Well, a lot actually. I started by writing down 10 ideas on a sheet of paper. They were almost all jokes (of course). One was "Two archeologist mice unearth an alien sphere that tries to sell them time shares". Some were just simple ideas like "A fire knight falls in love with an ice dragon". I showed the list to Maria and we whittled it down to three. I then elaborated on them a little bit. One of the ideas, the one I decided to go with was "A village trains an adventurer to overcome the local dungeon/labyrinth only to find the treasure is a mirror." I explained that the dungeoneering would be a montage of all the famous movie stuff as parody and that sold it to her. 

As I started to develop this idea I thought, wouldn't it be funny if a guy went through a bunch of riddle chambers and the Minotaur at the end just had his collection of mirrors that he was obsessed with? Normally the mirror would be 'The magic is in you' which we've seen in Kung Fu Panda and that Matrix Southpark parody of Wal-Mart. But I thought what if the Minotaur really really loved mirrors and there was no lesson at the end? That would be funny, right?

So I started to write the script. I pictured an old German style house cottage on a hill. It would be sunset and the husband would be coming home. I literally wrote "She was in the cabin making...." and I stopped. Why does she have to be making something? It's already sexist.

So I changed it to "She was reading by the window". But then it dawned on me, what if it's a he? What if it's a gay couple? The partner comes home because his job is gone. This gives the guy reading at the window, Pel, an excuse to pursue the labyrinth cave thing he found a little while ago. The partner, down to earth realist Alexander is sick of hearing about it and isn't in the mood now that they have no income.

The beginning is great! Very honest, the stakes are high. But then I realized, this can't just end with a joke about mirrors. This needs to be a bit more emotional. It ends with a life lesson (sorry) but I think it's cute and still manages to be overall a twist I don't think I've seen before. There's even 'The lie the character believes' so there's a character arc!

So with the script finished middle of last month, I hired actual voice actors for Alexander and Pel and Maria is the Minotaur guardian. This February I worked on getting the entire animatic done. Maria re-worked the Minotaur design (mine was my typical clunky crap). So my plan is March I'm going to ZBrush, 3D print and build the puppets! 

Wish me luck!

A new year! A new Plan!

 Hello!

   So I watched a 6 minute long stop motion video of two friends going to the park, sitting down next to each other on a bench and the whole gag is that they're texting each other on their phones. Everyone passing by is on their phones. Even a dog walks into frame and has a phone on a harness that he uses with his tail instead of playing fetch. The animation was okay. The social commentary was about as tedious and heavy handed as it sounds. 

    Why am I telling you this? At the very beginning of the film, it had a 3rd place winner stamp from some festival. I thought to myself "I can do better than that. I'm going to do better than that." I sat down and started thinking of storylines. 

    I've watched every episode I can get my hands on of "Lessons from the Screenplay", "Every Frame A Painting", "Just Write", and probably others I'm forgetting. I just finished John Truby's 'The Anatomy of Story'. I've watched every single best picture winner ever made (except Green Book, we still need to watch that). I can do this! I started this journey into stopmotion trying to make a masterpiece. That was a naïve mistake. It wasn't a waste at all, I learned a hell of alot with my attempt at Dasos. I spent all last year teaching myself and upping the game. I'm still far from where I want to be. I want to make it clear I consider my stuff 'Almost Good.' But I'm seeing stuff out there that frankly sucks and it's winning awards! 

    I hate to admit this, but I'm not a real artist. I've met real artists. Carina Fernandez is a real artist, Sam Mishlap is a real artist. I don't even like drawing. I'm not good at it because I don't do it enough and I don't do it enough because I'm not good at it. I enjoy making stuff. I enjoy lighting things. I love posting stuff and seeing the little 'views' number go up. Everyone compliments me on my okay stopmotion stuff. I love that. I love that I see crap all over YouTube and I know my stuff stands out in quality a little more than theirs. That's not what being an artist is about. That's just petty ego crap. 

So this year, I'm going to make a 6 minute long (or longer) short and I'm going to submit it to every single festival or competition I can find. I want to win 3rd place or better at ANYTHING! I don't care what it is. I'm sure I won't place at Cannes, but as long as I can post a video that has a little festival stamp on it, I'll be happy!        ... for like a day. 

Christmas 2020!

https://youtu.be/iXGBXjnJftA

 

Well! Here's the longest Stopmotion video I've ever done. It took two years to do Dasos (with a full time job) and only a month to do this. I made Anerin breath, and honestly, I think it looks great!!! I animated snow falling out the window, which was completely a last second decision. It looks okay. It's quaint and kind of charming. With more time, I definitely could have come up with a better system for it. The camera movement is good, but when it turns to keep Anerin in the center, it gets all jumpy. I hate the hand movements for her when she's checking out her claws, but I needed filler gags for the 2:30 minute long speech Santa gives. All her eye rolls are great! I'm happy-ish with the growling. I didn't realize the christmas tree was going to be dead center behind her the whole time. It's great for framing her in the lighting, but the tree is so pretty! I guess it has to be this way since the lights on the tree are way too bright for the scene. 

Next year I'd like all the shorts to be one continuous story. I want to start off with her assistant in the city before they've met. That would be fun. Not sure how many videos I'll be able to do. If I never get a job again, I can do 7 or 8 more two minute long videos. I'm working all of January and there's talk of me doing a minute long stop motion commercial for one of my friends maybe around late Feb or March. If I do get a job I might just go back to little experiments or maybe two 5 minute long animations for all of 2021. Who knows!!

Happy Thanksgiving 2020!

 

 Hello! I finished this quick one well in time for thanksgiving. It took three weeks; one week for making Gobbles, one week for the set, and one week for filming. Not too bad. I'm going to post a green screen lesson for you soon. That was by far the biggest challenge on this one. Keying out green when there is yellow, red, black, and blue in the screen was incredibly difficult!!!!!

Lets Talk YouTube

 

 I uploaded a new video to the channel. This one is a behind the scenes look at how the Fox Witch stuff is made. It's a little over 10 minutes long, almost doubling the length of time my channel has available. My goal is to try to get monetized on YouTube. I need 4,000 public watch hours and 1000 subscribers. I think the watch hours will come naturally over time... but 1000 subscribers?! That's a tall order. I have confidence though. Each time I see a 10 year old kid unboxing a flashlight with 110K views, I feel okay about it. 

To date, I have 37 subscribers and 12 watch hours. Not much you say. But think about it. I've only been live for a few months. My channel only has 7 videos with a total of 12 minutes of watch time! My longest non-making of video is 2:36. Most of them are only half a minute long! Think of how many times people have to watch such short little videos to get 12 hours!!! So I'm looking very optimistically about this!

The next thing I'm working on is an 18 second long thanksgiving day message. Once everything is done being made (puppet, set, lighting) I hope I can crank out one or two more for the month of November. The set is literally going to just be fake autumn leaves from Hobby lobby or whatever I can find, with a blue background. If it takes two weeks to make (it's November RIGHT NOW!!) then maybe I'll just do two videos. 

Anyway, it's fun doing all this and I guess I'm thankful for having all the time in the world to do this!

Stay safe! Stay Healthy! 

Halloween 2020 Message!

 

The next video is up on YouTube! 

https://youtu.be/iK_EijQ60z8

As you can see, my animation is getting better, but is far from perfect. The movements are often coming too late, making the audio seem off... which it's not. I LOVE when she rolls her eyes when she says "Door to Door" but the first 10 seconds it looks like the audio isn't matching. Mouth choices aren't great yet combined with movements that are starting into the words that are the emphasis words and not before. The movement should crescendo when the audio for the word crescendos. 

The Vixen's Cauldron Now up to view!!!

 

https://youtu.be/iySM-UiHLhY

I finished my next piece just in time to premiere it on October 1st! I hope you enjoy it! I want her to be a recurring character. The first of a few. Her 3D printed parts worked great! Blinking is still a bit of a pain, but far superior to sticking clay onto an eye. Her eyes worked PERFECTLY!!! I just had to print them a little bit smaller than I originally planned to get the eyelids to fit as well. The hair was from a huge pony toy. Luckily they had one with silver hair. Even with the fan turned on, it was never a problem. I got better with animating her as I went on. This is the second take that I had done. Each take took 8 hours from start to finish. I couldn't bring myself to do a third take. I really should have though. This animation is the best I've done so far, but it's still only close to being good. 

I'm going to do a short Halloween message with her next and post that on the 26th, hopefully. It shouldn't be too hard. I'm going to use the same set and the same lighting. It should just be a matter of writing and recording dialogue, assigning the face set to it, then filming it in a take or two.

I'm not sure if anyone goes to this blog anymore. If you do, please comment! I'm considering taking it down due to lack of interest. 

Thanks! 

Stop Motion: Terra Magma

 https://youtu.be/bfDvCogVeKQ

Terra Magma is finally finished! Thank you Maria Stuckey for the wonderful title! I kept just calling it "Lava" but that just didn't sit right with me. Thanks to Ellee Gilley for the use of her green screen background. I'm so happy that my little ship kept working throughout the whole shoot. 

The New YouTube Channel!!!!

 Hello all 25 of you that follow this blog! I started a YouTube channel under the Sculptwerks name!

Here's a link!!! Please watch, like and subscribe!!!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0fmLB1VjUYdNX2wZHsfc7A

Stopmotion: slow blur!

     As I filmed water, I knew I needed a whole bunch of angles and takes just to give myself enough material to edit down later. One of the shots I tried that didn't make the cut was a slow blur into frame. In animation you can film on the twos (12 frames of movement for 24 frames per second). This can be used to acheive a slow motion effect. Sometimes you can animate on the threes! Well, I thought it would be cool to very very slowly come into focus over a few seconds, but it's easier said than done when each second is whipping by at 24 frames. I'm adjusting the focus ring on my camera by hand, keep in mind. 
     I tried on the twos and it went by way too fast. It was also a fast stop. Nothing smooth about it. I skipped the threes and (stupidly) tried to move it just once every 5 frames! That produced a transition that would start and stop very abruptly. 
     The video above is this done correctly. I had used the notches that were already in the focus ring on the camera to judge the distance to move it. But what I needed to do, and what I DID do above, is measure the start and stop distance (one inch exactly). I divided that by 3 seconds of filming, which is 72 frames. Then I divided that in half, because I knew I could get away with filming on the twos. So in one inch I needed 36 marks. I went into Photoshop and made 36 lines that were equi-distant to each other and then scaled it down to 1 inch and printed it! I taped it to my camera and VIOLA!!! 

Here's the setup. I used a post-it note because it's an opaque sticker that's easily cut and readily available!

Stopmotion: Water!

Here's the next one! Water! Maria, my lovely wife, was kind enough to read a poem so this piece could have a little more going on than just visuals. 

I'm really enjoying the Adobe creative suite. It's really thought out and jives well together. I can't wait to start putting keyed out green armature stands in my stopmotion stuff! 

I really wanted to mask out the background and add in sky. I could have done that in a second in After effects had I only filmed this in front of a key green background. The clear water makes that very difficult now, unfortunately. I think the drywall background is killing this piece. But I just remind myself, it's an experiment. Using shrink wrap for water works great! I really like how the bubbles look too. They're just a series of hot glue on cut out acetate. I learned that water, ironically, can be chaotic and still read as water. Fire, on the other hand, needs to flow and move gracefully. I would have thought the opposite true. 

Stopmotion: I'm Still here!

  I've had more time, working from home, to get stop motion stuff cranked out. I did two more fire tests, started learning Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects and made a nice little video of all three fires together with explanations. Hopefully the video above loads. It's only 1 minute or so long, but it's a 79mb file! That just seems big to me.

Stopmotion: FIRE!!!

Well, I managed to finish my Dasos intro on time. All the sound effects are there and at some point I'll post it. For now, I hate it. It really looks like someone's first attempt at stop motion. I learned alot and now I want to move on to 2020 being the year of little tests and experiments! To start with, February can be FIRE month!! Here's a rotation around a camp fire using 12 different fire pieces. It's a pretty intense fire. I'd like to have a dark blue background and maybe some foreground grass rotating with the dirt. It'll be fun to play with over the next few weeks. 

Stopmotion: Dasos Intro filming complete!

Well, I did it! I actually managed to get this 'finished' by christmas! Of course, I still want to add music, sound effects, my logo in the beginning, the title at the end..... but the hardest part is over!!!! I learned A LOT from making this! The plan now is to take the entire next year doing little stopmotion studies. I want to learn how to photoshop stuff out of the movies frame by frame so I can remove rigs and stuff just like the professionals. 

Some of the lessons.

- No windows!!!    All the lighting fluctuations are from the sun popping in and out of the clouds outside despite the sun blocking curtain in place. If you have a window, you have to physically cover it with cardboard or something solid. 

- LED lights only!!!   My little highlight flashlight for the tree and fence kept burning through batteries. About six batteries in total. That's another reason for the lighting being as crazy as it is. My LED flashlight? Never used up it original batteries. Ideally, don't have any lights on batteries. Just use LEDs with color filters to get the warmth you want. 

- Step-able camera rig.  My next camera rig will have gears and some measurable way of advancing the camera along the axis. Every single pan or boom or zoom is jumpy and not great looking. I did it all by hand and I just eyed it all. Not a great strategy over the course of hundreds of frames.  

- Dont go magnet to magnet. The mouths all used tiny neodinium magnets. This, overall, worked just fine, but I had them attach bare magnet in the mouth to bare magnet in the head. In hind sight, I'm just making changing out the mouth physically harder than it needs to be and I changed out the mouth about a thousand times during this whole thing.

- Keep it simple. Until I learn how to do post process editing frame by frame, I need to stick to simple wire armatures. Picture hanging wire seems to be the best balance between strength and flexibility so far. I also need to learn how to make good armatures. The metal ball and socket thing looks great and should work fantastically, but in reality (for me) all the joints fall loose and theirs no way to access the screws during shooting to tighten them.

I'm going to make a plan for next year. Maybe I'll have one goal for each month. I want to buy an SLA printer and make custom muzzle mouths. I don't plan on doing too much animation with humans to be honest. I want to try and animate fire, smoke and water. I need to get better with movement in general. I'll probably be learning that for the rest of my life. I want to make a head with movable eyes and (hopefully) eyelids that also are movable inside. So much to do! So exciting!!!!

Stopmotion: What I've got so far.

 This is the first time I'm seeing everything I've done so far together. I'm amazed at how well the fog/cloud transition worked. It's perfect! 

Unfortunately, that's the only positive I can take away from this. It looks so much more clunky and amateurish than I had imagined it to look. He's so damn jittery when he talks. There's nothing smooth about any of it. I guess it looks exactly like what it is: someone's first attempt at stop motion. At least the set and the lighting is top notch.

The next shot is the longest, but also one of the easiest. He just pulls three letters out of the bag and smiles at the camera. I'll probably cut to a different angle for the third letter. 

After that the very final shot is the exit shot out to the mountains again, which I've already filmed. 

Once this is all done, I'm looking forward to spending the next year doing little test animations and experiments. I want to flush out some furry characters I've been wanting to do. A old green fox witch is one of them. Plus, I'd like to animate characters that don't just sound like me but louder.  

Stopmotion: Scene 3 Take 1

It took 5 hours, but this is the first take of scene 3. I'm actually really happy with it. I think it could be a bit smoother, but honestly I don't know if I want to do it all over again. We'll see in a few days. It's been wonderful having the whole week off. I'm making weeks of progress in only a few days! 

So, I burned through more flashlight batteries on my filament bulb flashlight. That's why the tree gets slightly brighter about half way through. I also realised I couldn't have him sit completely upright because I framed the tree directly above him. I refuse to have tangents like that!!!! It all reads well, though. I'm confident that I can cut on the action at the end of him opening the bag and that will transition smoothly into him looking into the tunnel of mail. 

.... I hope. 

Stopmotion: Scene 2 take 5

Well, I like this one better. I drilled the hole for his wire mount so that he can shift forwards and backwards, which helped convey struggling a lot better. Well... at all...

I took the whole week off, so I'm going to work on this Monday - Wednesday, 8 hours a day. Then, of course, thanksgiving is Thursday. 

I'm not in love with this shot. My second set of batteries burned out on the foreground tree. you can see the tree light back up when the camera stops panning. I think LED flashlights are the way to go from here on out. They last something like 30 hours straight. To be fair to the filament bulb, I am using batteries that we used during Halloween. 

Also, right when the camera stops panning, the whole frame shifts. This is because I scratched the paint off the center of the upper lip, transitioning mouths because I didn't bother cutting my damn finger nails. When I got up to paint the face, I slammed my back against the camera crane. After a half hour of trying I got it lined back up as best I could. Lesson: trim your nails before shooting. Also, always be incredibly careful as to where you occupy space. 

As always, the running is horribly animated. I have almost no control once the puppet has no legs to support itself. A professional would have the puppet supported with a massive rig that travels straight up and out of the frame. That rig would either be keyed out or photoshoped out or whatever. I THINK that kind of stuff is done in After Effects, but I'm not sure. I'm just trying to do everything in-camera right now. 

For the first project I've ever done, it's good enough. I have three okay shots to choose from. I can't spend 10 more months screwing around with one shot. I'd rather just keep moving. I'm not winning any film festival awards for a Rankin Bass parody anyway. 

Stopmotion: Scene 2 Take 4

So, yeah. Over a month and I only have one more good take to show for it. I did two more takes in between this one and the last. The first one I hit the camera with my shoulder by accident and never could find the right position again. The second one, the puppet slid way down and I couldn't ever get him to get back up again. I don't love this one. It's passable I guess. It's better than the horrible first take. I'm going to try one more time to give myself another shot at doing it right. It's not just the stiff camera boom and pan. It's not just the awkward, slow animation, it's also that he slids down the whole time and I can't control where he pivots. It's very frustrating. A real professional would have a huge key green rig that holds him up and would just get taken out in post. I don't know how to do that.