Proppin' it up

Well, apparently for some reason my blog has made it to Blogs of Note, and now my traffic has increased many times over! Kind of frustrating that it happened while the top post wasn't even my own work, but Fimfarum! So I thought I'd post my latest prop work to get it seen before the wave is over. And the price of this sudden and short-lived fame? Photobucket just emailed me to let me know I'm about to exceed my bandwidth for the month and all my photos will disappear until next month (unless I buy a Pro account, of course). Oh, plus I'm getting loads of spam now. But it's also brining lots of new viewers to my humble little stopmo blog, so it's all good. hopefully some of them will like what they see and when all the publicity blows over I'll have increased my readership.

So welcome to all new readers!!! To see examples of some of my practice animation, check my YouTube channel.

Spammers beware though... I mercilessly delete spam.

The glasses are all made from acrylic. I've learned that extruded acrylic is a lot nicer to work with than cast acrylic... less likely to break and easier to shape. Usually sites that sell acrylic tubing etc will state which type it is. I used a miter box with a hack saw to cut it as straight as possible, and I used a propane torch to heat and bend some parts and to round off the cut edges after sanding. You have to be careful though... if you heat it slightly too much it starts to bubble. I got some bubbles here and there... hopefully they won't show too much in the film. A heat gun (for paint stripping) heats it more gently and is good for heating up large areas that you want to bend or distort... but the torch was what I needed for pinpoint accuracy to bend those little handles. Then I used this excellent adhesive made for acrylic called Weld-on 16. Nothing else works anywhere near this well for acrylic. It's nice and thick, so you can use it to fill gaps and pieces don't need to fit perfectly. Oh, an for the bottoms of the mugs I poured clear resin... something called Easy Cast made by Castin' Craft. Pretty easy to use.. one-to-one mix ratio.

Fimfarum - now including The Making of

Here is the Czech puppetfilm Fimfarum collected in its entirety, and with English subtitles even!!! Amazing!!! What a world we live in! I've assembled it all into a nifty playlist so it will play through uninterrupted for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.



As an added bonus, here's The Making of Fimfarum 1 & 2... in English!! Sorry the quality doesn't match the quality of the videos above.

For lots more of this Eastern European Puppetfilm goodness, hit up the Video Clips page on my website or visit The Motion Brigades on YouTube. My site has brief teasers from a lot of Czech and Eastern European puppetfilms, the Motion Brigades has the full length films.

Care for a frosty beverage?

I've been playing with a lot of clear plastic lately... mainly acrylic tubing and rod (plus some 3mm glass balls embedded in lumps of microcrystaline wax for foam). I remember dreading doing a film set in a bar mostly for this reason... I didn't know how in the world I was going to make little bottles of all different descriptions, much less glasses and mugs, and then on top of all that animate liquids and foam! But little by little, it's all been coming together.

I still need to replace the hotglue bases of the glasses with cast clear resin duplicates to get rid of that milky white look. And add handles to the mugs. Then I MIGHT even tackle making some wine glasses... but I'm not too sure of that one!

Mummified monsters in a frosted web

Thought this was pretty appropriate for the beginning of Monster Month! This is what a spider web looks like after being hit with a good dose of spray adhesive. I generally don't feel the need to kill every spider in the house - I know they keep the other insect under control and all, but this time there were extenuating circumstances.... not only was there a pretty big mamma spider at the center of this web, but a cluster of about a thousand little tiny dots, all of which would have become strapping little warrior spiders soon and gone tramping all over the house.

I've heard spray adhesive is the best way to kill them, because it glues shut the breathing spiracles located on their legs (I think?) and suffocates them quick. Seems to work pretty well... she twitched for about a minute and then stopped moving, and I haven't seen any of the babies move at all.

Click on the image to see it on Flickr and you can scroll over it for notes pointing out exactly where all the still-life is located in this tangled web. Plus of course then you can click on "All Sizes" above it to see the large version in all its gory Haloweeny glory!

Dressing the set

The puppets are all dressed now and I'm starting on the set. Note the front of the bar.

Costume dept. has been working overtime

They're all dressed now, aside from a few accessories here and there (plus hands and feet for the littlest one Cindy Lou). As I went they just kept getting brighter and more colorful. Shelley, you might recognize some of the fabric I used on the last 2 puppets... you sent it to me.

I'm developing puppet personalities for them, and complex relationships/dysfunctions, as well as working on a lighting technique that minimizes the slight shininess of the heads and makes the faces fully visible in spite of the extremes of light and dark on them all. Looks like my best bet will be a pretty diffused "cartoon" lighting setup, mostly reflected light.



... Here's a pictorial tutorial on how I've been making the clothes lately....

First I cut the cloth to size and tape it to something for spray adhesive treatment. Note the blue Nitrile glove. Give it a pretty heavy coat of spray adhesive. I do this part outside.



Here I'm pressing Cindy Lou against the back part of her costume.



And pressing the front part into place. Care is essential. I press tightly all around the puppet, trying to get the seam line as tight as possible. I do this for a while, hoping the adhesive will do its work well. If anything comes apart later I can always fix it up with some Fabri-Tac though.



Here she is well into the trimming process. I found this velvet stuff very hard to cut. It also doesn't stretch, so it's pretty unforgiving stuff to work with. Note how I handled the collar... I made sure to put a wrinkle in the right place so it ended up looking like a mock turtleneck. It still needs more trimming though, and I'm not sure I can get as close as I want to. Maybe the dremel with a sanding drum.... ?

Cindy Lou is a little older than in her former star turn (in How the Grinch Stole Christmas)... she's turned in her pink sleeper for a red jumper and gone Goth.

What I'm learning is that puppet clothes don't need to look realistic... in fact it's best if they're not. Stylization suits them well.

5 of 8

5 of my 8 actors now dressed to kill.



Getting ready for his pants.



Tom is a rocker. He still just needs his wristbands. I've coated all the formerly sticky rubber arms with a clear coat of the new No-Tac Acrylic Adhesive from Monstermakers (well... new to me, not new to Monstermakers). It'll be nice when they no longer stick to each other and pull chunks of paint off when I pry them apart.

Oh, I should mention... one little trick I figured out... when you get gobs of glue spreading out all over a jacket or something you can scrape it off after it's dried with an X-Acto knife. If you kind of try scraping in different directions you'll suddenly find the right one and it will almost magically lift off. The scraping can also put some nice wear on the cloth... I don't like that bright, too-clean kind of thing - I want some clothes that look like old favorites.