Intro to the making of session 2: 1/11/17: Plastercine Marquette of designed charatcter:

Our Wednesday sessions of Intro to the making of had begun and in this session we were in the maker space of the university campus putting the turnarounds we made on Monday to good use. Our task was to create 3D Marquette's of our designed devils and demons characters using plastercine on armatures which is the typical model building method that animations like Wallace and Gromit would do to create their models for animation, but in our case it would be used as reference models much like Disney use in their animation films. We wouldn't be using complicated armature kits  like we would soon be using in animation 10, instead we would be using materials such as coat hanger wire, pipe cleaners and masking tape. The plastercine we would be using was clear grey plastercine as some of the example Marquette we were shown seemed to be painted with colour.


We were advised that if we didn't finish the reference models today we would have chance to do it another time in our own time at uni the maker space would be free for us to use provided there wasn't a lesson. We were told there were tutorials online that we could look at in creating armatures and how animators such as the brains behind Robot Chicken would buy old toys off eBay, disassemble them and put them back together as armatures, this series was meant to as Annabeth put it " take the mick out of existing franchises to which I had to agree, as some of their work was slightly disturbing.

When using the maker space our point of contact would be Tasha who we met during last months intro to the making of when we did our dropping egg exercises. We could use the materials in the room but was still a work in progress the idea of this was to get our hands dirty. I had looked into armatures by looking into the making of Wallace and Gromit behind the scenes footage and it involved tying wire together to create a skeleton for the figure and I began by testing which materials would be sufficient for the skeleton to test the limitations which was the point of the exercise. I tested the pipe cleaners when making the skeleton and whilst they bent easily they were slightly weak and wouldn't maintain balance, so it was clear the traditional media of the coat hanger wire would be the best option.


To piece this together I measured out the wire for different parts of the body such as the legs, body and arms. Using pliers I cut the wire into three sections then began tying them to each other. The body had one loop at the top to represent the head which was thin much like my character turn around  then tying the arms wire to the armature and making long shoulder pads in the armature to compliment the model sheet and later cloak. Since my character had no legs it would need to stand up so I used the wire to make a base for the character as Annabeth suggested having a base for our characters to stand on. When securing the ties I coated the armature in masking tape and folded the sharp ends of the wire down to prevent any cuts or it coming through the plastercine. The whole armature was coated in masking tape as past experience taught me that it was best to coat the armature before applying the plastercine.

This I felt was a good use of my model making skills from College 3D classes and past experience in this field of animation. The piece was then coated with white plastercine and I made the arms long and thin to give it that boney look about them to make this demon very terrifying something worthy of Tim Burton himself. I left the head and fingers to last as they were the more detailed areas of the body however when building the character it needed to be stable and not lose balance which was because the more plastercine added it would lose balance and bend so large amounts were placed at the base, on the back and on the shoulders to maintain the balance of the figure. The end body was long and thin as this would be a cloaked based figure and the cloak would stand out more if the figure was long and thin.

The fingers were created using thin pieces of plastercine and I moulded them to the shape of sharp bony fingers which by looking back at the model sheet I was able to shape and make look realistic even using a plastic knife and fork to cut in small scratches to make them look like rinkles in the fingers and knuckles. I modelled the face last as it would be the only element that would be hard to sculpt as it didn't have any expressions on the face as the eyes I figured would be done by computer if used for animation later in the future. The face was long thin and curved but I added a small bridge where the nose would be to at least make it slightly human then applying scratch marks to the face to make him look broken and sinister. When attached to the body I used plastercine to secure it to the neck and the back of the head to make it look like a sinister skull in the head.

One element that I needed guidance on was the cloak for the character and after consulting with Annabeth she suggested the use of black fabric to create the cloak, and this meant putting what I'd learned in College textiles lessons to use, but I did feel slightly nervous as it had been a long time since I did clothing for anything other than old cuddly toy ducks from my childhood. So I cut some of the fabric and cut a small hole within the middle for the head to pass through, however my first attempt the hole was slightly too big and the same was said on my second attempt, but as its said the third times the charm and I got it to the correct size and length for the cloak on the characters skeleton a separate piece of fabric was placed on the head of the character to get a better idea of how to do the hood for the cloak.

The stitching would be a problem as there didn't seem to be a sewing kit at hand for this task which did make me wish I brought my book binding tool box with me as that had sewing thread, Annabeth presented many ways to secure it together however she said it was perfectly alright for me to go to the Works at the Lowery Outlet, which was what I did and decided to leave it at the maker space to be ready for next time we did something like this. The way I did this was first applying the pins to secure the hood on the cloak body as remembering from college textiles lessons would help keep it secure as I sewed the cloak together. Stitching using grey coloured thread so that I could see where I was stitching as it was difficult to see black against black, though its the probable point when it came to clothing and the design process.

I stitched the hoods back together first so that I would have a shape when stitching the hood to the cloak itself. The technique used was long stitching which was a method used in machine stitching. Once the hood was stitched together I removed the cloak so that could be sewn to the cloak itself without accidentally stitching or compromising the cloak. One other element was the sleeves of the cloak but before these could be attached the cloaks body had to be sewn together and to sew it together the fabric was cut at an angle to cut holes for the sleeves but kept the shoulders hanging much like the turnaround sheet.

The next step was to sew the sides of the cloak so that when doing the sleeves it wouldnt flap around or lose track of the stitching which could cause a mistake learning from past experience when doing either tote bags or scarf like stitching for my past college textiles lessons. I stitched across the folded lines to make it hang out a bit as the character was essentially a smoked cloak based body made of dark shadow itself. When sewing the sleeves I started out by sewing the long sleeve together first leaving the open ends un sewn to the cloak so that it could pass through. However there was a down side and this was the hands when sliding on the sleeves the fingers got caught on the cloak compromising their shape, eventually I was able to sew on the first but given this development I removed the fingers from the next hand so that the second sleeve would slide on with ease.

When sewing I sew the stitches across to fix it to the cloaks upper half and though it seemed rough in presentation it did look like a good cloak. However I wanted to cover the base so I cut additional fabric to go on the bottom of the cloak, and stitched them to the front, back and sides which wasn't what I was intending but the stitching and the cuts in the fabrics shape did aid in the sinister side of this characters personality. I then performed turn around photos using my phones camera for documentation and my blog post for this session, and was left with the question of what to do next?

Annabeth suggested that I should take the figure to the Stopmotion animation studio space to take photos from different perspectives and glows in the light as the fabric as I could see was very reflective. I tried some photos using my camera flash but Annabeth insisted that I should do this in the stop motion suites, so I decided to do it just to see how it would impact the model in the light positions to see if it would add more to the character. 

When inside the stop motion space, I started using the lamps in the space to do lighting from both sides to see its effect and it did cast a very sinister like shadow upon the floor below. This was shown when I tried experimenting from different light positions, this was also an education in terms of the light of the sun and the shading positions on the character and I wondered if this is how illustrators and artists do this with their characters to get an idea of shading. The reflectiveness of the fabric seemed to indicate highlights within the characters cloak and its shadowed creased areas. 

Annabeth did have a point by doing this exercise and it even added more shadowing on the characters face and gave me an idea in terms of character and presentation. 

Upon returning to the maker space I could see the session was coming to a close and when taking further documentation photos I couldn't help but wonder that an element was missing from this character. Thats when I looked back at the turn around sheet and noticed that I'd forgotten to include the tears and cuts within the cloak to show the shadow burning off the cloak, so I used scissors to cut the sleeves, chest and near bottom area of the cloak, I tried tearing but the fabric it seemed was too thick to tear with my fingers. However the cuts seemed to replicate this just fine with some thread coming off the fabric. 

 Final piece against turn around sheet.

Reflecting back on this lesson I felt that I had done a very good job of doing this model and it helped that I remembered my modelling skills from 3D lessons and even the armature skeleton construction using just bare essentials and a box of bits from past experience and research from behind the scenes footage from films. This I felt linked to the module as a whole as this was part of the making of element of animations. However one thing that I could draw back on from this lesson was the look of the cloak, as whilst it represented the shadow and sinister look of the characters personality and theme, I felt like I'd rushed this slightly and didn't seem like my best work. Otherwise my work on the plastercine was very well used and even the fingermarks created the spiny thin bony hands and arms of the body and the thin body with the cloak was a good decision to do. 

Looking back if I could do this over again I would possibly have figured out what colour to paint the character so that it wouldn't compromise the cloak when stitching together. I would also take the time to measure the character against the fabric to get a better sense of scale of how to do the characters clothing like a traditional designer would rather than just cutting up random shapes. I was all but satisfied with the work done today and at some point may revisit this character to apply the final few touches to the character maybe even some additions, however our next focus was the presentation we would be doing about our character design process in this module before we move onto our next phase which was set design.