More than one person has asked me what exactly do you need for a simple puppet. The basic materials are foam latex, an armature, faces. The best place for me to buy foam latex is http://www.burmanindustries.com, or http://www.animationtoolkit.co.uk/, both are trustworthy. I prefer foam latex over clay, it's easier to use (after molded properly) although, it is somewhere around 15 - 20 times more expensive than clay, but if it will work for you budget it works best. The armature is sort of tricky, it depends on how much you use the character. For instance, all the puppets on Robot Chicken all have wire armatures, on the other hand with a feature flick like Coraline, all the armatures are ball-and-socket. I usually use a wire armature. You can buy the wire at a reasonable price here on http://www.amazon.com. The best way to make an wire armature is to use a drill to twist two strands of wire to create a heavy duty wire; then tie wires together for arms, legs, etc. Faces are a hard subject to talk about because everyone has there own way. There are three main types of face animation: replacement faces, cut out faces, and one animate-able face (this method was used in Fantastic Mr. Fox). Overall, that's the basics, you can buy most of it on Amazon, thanks for your time!
Interview with Bram Meindersma, Composer and Sound Designer of Oscar® Nominated Stop Motion Short Film, "Negative Space"
Sam and his father, from Negative Space . Source: Vimeo. Unlike practically every other medium, film has the unique aesthetic of being composed of the elements of sound and image, and, curiously, whenever watching a film, the two blend together into something of an impeccably hybridized concoction. With as much influence as sound has over the audience’s final experience of any given film, composer and sound designer Bram Meindersma’s work on the Oscar-nominated stop motion short film Negative Space – directed by Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter – proves an endlessly fascinating and extraordinary case study, as it uses sound – both its soundtrack as well as every other element of sound design – only sparingly and in subtle ways, one that could almost be called conservative. Yet it is perhaps just that component of its sound design that, at least in part, makes the film such a powerful one. Perhaps the reason why Meindersma’s delicate work on Negative Space is so powerful is i
Comments
Post a Comment