The Day I Made the Blog

Today I gave the puppet arms of white clay and partly built a leg. The rest of my day has been taken up making this blog and writing all the previous enteries, I shall finish the puppet tomorrow as I am off to watch Fringe now.

27th August 2009

After having a day off and much fun catching up with friends it was time to get back to working on my puppet. Once more, armed with my glue gun, I decided to use the dense foam to bulk out the torso and keep the weight down.

Then I mixed a light shade of grey modelling clay and covered the torso with it.

25th August 2009

Puppet mkII. This time I decided to try my hand at making a full armature. I had avoided this after the poor effort at building the frame for the backdrop. So I got my pieces of wire and my glue gun and began to bring to life the main character of the story, not unlike Dr Frankenstein. This took me most of the day but the result was pretty good, not aesthetically but functionally.

23rd-24th August 2009

Time to begin making the puppets. I decided instead of trying to make the puppet entirely out of modelling clay I would build a torso out of dense foam and then limbs separately using pieces of wire twisted together and a glue gun to strength the parts I didn't want to bend. The plan went well, I covered the torso in clay and it was still nice and light. I then covered the limbs in clay too ready to be attached to the torso.

I then made the head, using a cotton ball I again covered it with clay. It took a few redesigns but I got there in the end. I put it all together and was fairly happy with the outcome. The only problem was that as I moved the limbs it made the holes in the foam torso looser and looser. So I packed it with clay but to make it strong enough was to make it too strong to move the limbs easily. It was time to once again go back to the drawing board...

21st-22nd August 2009

More changes were made, to the design of the set and to the location. Untill now the set had been built on my dining room table, which had also been moved to make better use of the space. This, as my Dad pointed out, meant that for the next couple of months whilst making the film I would have nowhere to eat my dinner. To solve this problem the set was then moved into my study and placed out one of my outdoor tables. Much to Carls dismay we no longer had room for the frame he had made for the backdrop, we had a wall instead.

Now I could eat dinner once more, in a civilised fashion, I could continue to think about how to make the set look better. Still the grid lines were more obvious than I would have liked. Then my Dad had the bright idea of painting more detail onto the landscape to obscure these lines. While I had the paints out again I decided I may as well add some detail onto the mountainous backdrop I had cut out of the foam. Thankfully I am now happy with the look of the set and it is time to start making the main characters!

19th -20th August 2009

After waiting a couple of days for more materials to arrive in the post I had been given chance to think about what we had done so far. What I had decided is that the foam base wasn't convincing enough as the moon, it was too bland as well as being too obviously foam. On top of that the joins between pieces of foam were rather unsightly.

To remedy this problem my Dad and I filled in the joins with modelling clay. This looked better but the grid lines were still obvious, so we used modelling clay to make the whole landscape uneven and more "rocky". To blend all the materials together and make the landscape complete I painted it with grey acrylic paint. To give the impression of distance I then cut a mountainous backdrop out of foam to place against the night sky backdrop, which in itself caused me some problems.

I had decided I wanted LEDs protruding through the backdrop to give the impression of stars. This caused a problem. The foam I was going to make my night sky out of looked rubbish with loads of LEDs behind causing a lot of ripples and general uneven-ness. So a new plan had to be put into action. Luckily my Dad had found my sisters art supplies she had left behind. I naturally aquired the aforementioned supplies.

I took a couple of canvases and painted them with black acrylic paint and cut holes into them to poke the LEDS through. All was going to plan, or so I thought. After taking a few test shots with my K20D it turned out the LEDS were too bright and caused a lot of lighting issues. So in the end we decided we just needed to get a diffused light source behind the canvases to give the impression of stars in the night sky.

August 15th-16th Production begins

On the weekend of the 15th August 2009 Maya and Tom came over to put the finishing touches on the EP and to help me start production of the film, well the 3D animation part of the film anyway. I had already drawn 12secs of animation that will feature within the film.

While Tom and Carl were working on mixing the EP Maya and myself went out to B&Q to buy the materials to build the set. We had great plans to build a frame to attach the backdrop to. "How hard can it be?" we thought, a few pieces of wood nailed together, not a problem. It didn't take long for us to appreciate the skils of a carpenter and a joiner and for us to realise that we weren't blessed with them. Luckily Carl knows what he is doing when it comes to building wooden frames and saved the day.

After a trip to Hobby Craft we went about building a lunar landscape from foam and modelling clay. Once the craters had been moulded we then started on the props, spaceships, planets, flowers, worms, you know, the usual.

At last the production had begun, how little did I know how much work would be involved and how much I had to learn...

How it started

It all started when my friends band, Pocket Satellite, began writing songs for their new EP "Toy Train". Maya, Tom and Carl spoke to me about how they wanted to make a simple video for one of their songs. I liked the idea and fancied getting involved myself. As it turns out I just happen to have some spare time on my hands so I offered to help Maya with the video and thankfully she agreed.


As I listened to the song over and over I began to get a few ideas for the video. Maya had drawn a character she wanted to use as the art work for the EP and we thought it would be a nice tie in if we could base the film on that character. So for the next month or so I started sketching and playing around with some ideas that became more and more extravagant. The band have been really enthusiastic about all my ideas and have let me take control of the film, whether this is a good idea or not we shall see.

So this is the continuing blog of how, with the help of a few friends and family, I am turning the little love story I have written into a short animated film.