It's Betty and Hoppy. Betty doesn't need tiedowns in her feet because she'll remain seated throughout the entire performance, and Hoppy... well, he needs tie-downs all over because he likes to bounce off the walls and ceiling a lot. He's a bit wired.
This isn't my progress report for today, just wanted to post last night's work and put names to the faces. I think I'll make a new body for Hoppy.... I wanted the legs ridiculously short, but I think they're too short! Man, when I think about how painstaking this has been because of the aluminum chest blocks.... I could have made all these armatures in a few days if they were all simple one-piece designs, and I would have been able to more freely design them. I think in the future I'll go with much simpler armatures and use smaller nuts (regular hex nuts or square nuts) for the tie-downs. Or better yet just drill and tap some aluminum plates. And I wish I had used thinner nails for the bones. Those forearms especially get pretty thick in paces.... that's gonna be a bitch later.
Also, today I ordered some liquid latex from Monstermakers. After all my experimenting with the Dragonskin, I think I'm going to use latex buildup instead, because it's so much easier to paint. I also ordered a very interesting product I've never tried called Latex Softening Agent. Should be fun to play around with anyway.
4 comments:
Yeah yeah yeah! Go Mike! What was the point of aluminium blocks then? You mean I don't have to use those?! Yay yay yay.
Hey, keep us posted on the latex softening agent....
The reason I used the aluminum blocks was because I wanted to try making the arms from silicone..... otherwise it would have been a lot easier just to make armatures entirely from wire and epoxy putty. Oh, the only other reason for the blocks that i can think of is if you're filming a long movie or a series and you have recurring characters with wire armatures. The blocks make it easy to replace an arm or leg when it breaks without having to build another entire duplicate armature.
See, my plan was to take just the arms, sculpt onto them with Chavant NSP (or super sculpey, left unbaked) and make little molds and cast them up in Dragonskin, then I could attach them back onto the puppet. I also figured it would make dressing them easier... often the biggest problem is getting sleeves over the hands.
After this, I;m going back to my tried and true (and much simpler) methods... like the way I made Buster and Tonic... and the way I'll be making the secret puppet tonight. Heh... I just like typing secret puppet
secret puppet
secret puppet
secret puppet
secret puppet
;)
nice! it must have been hard to animate those little legs
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