Monday, September 04, 2006

Darkland production race... day 2

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These six heads are now safely ensconced in their chest blocks... or easily can be with the simple twist of an allen key. Each head has 3 wires coming out of it... my idea was to fold all 3 wires in half to double the thckness inside the section of tubing, so the neck wires are solidly wedged in there and the Quickweld only has to aid and abet the physical connection. I always like to make my connections as solid as possible in this manner... I don't like to trust adhesive to hold up under the rigors of animation. It turned out not to be quite that simple though... all 3 wires folded in half was just a little too thick and couldn't be jammed into the tubing, so i had to cut one shorter and only fold 2 in half. Heh... it always has to get complicated, doesn't it?

And I also made my prototype arm... very similar to the arms I made for the Catatonic Drunk puppet a while ago, only this time I didn't wrap with silk thread until After quickwelding the lengths of nail on for bones. This way the thread is wrapped inside the JB Quickweld, embedded permanently in it. And it saves me a step on each arm (and there's one less toxic substance to inhale!).

Plans for the next session... make as many arms as possible. Hopefully the remaining 11. We'll see.

3 comments:

Shelley Noble said...

These are looking so cool, Mike. They've moved from Scott's puppets into stop motion puppets, your terrain, now.

11 arms sounds hella work. Too bad you can't change em out, swap em when a character isn't in a sequence. Eh, maybe it's not too bad. Once you get going on the third, you'll prolly be able to put a movie on in the background.

Yay! Mike!!

UbaTuber said...

Lookin' good, man...and hey, less toxic inhalants, SafetyBoy would be proud :)

Darkmatters said...

Hmmm... the ol' swap-an-arm trick! Nice idea. Unfortunately I think it would be harder than just making them all.

Now that I've worked out my techniques on the proto-arm I won't be doing them one at a time anymore. With this kind of repetitive work you're better off efficiencywise to get an assembly line going.

And NO MOVIES~!!!

Hey Jeffrey... don't tell Sven, but I think I counteracted any positive effects of less inhalants by not wearing gloves while working with the Quickweld! D-oh!