A little test...

Well heeeello! How are we all enjoying this fine summer huh? If you're in the UK, you're probably not.  It's hellish, so it's time to hold up in the basement flat where it's nice and cool and buckle down to some work. I'm currently in the process of moving house and as such, the production here has had to take a back seat for a few days, but I'm still trying to use what little time I have to get things done.

This week I made my first ever mould. The Haunt's puppets will require push moulds to be made so that I can keep the replacement mouths consistant and so the, god forbid, I should squish Clara's face, I can just cast another :)

Some of you over on my instagram feed - @joshjobrien were asking me about the process, so I thought for this weeks blog post, I'd throw together  a rough and ready process study of how to make a two part plaster mould.

Check it out! -

So first off, we need a postive model to mould. For this I'm going to use the first maquette I made of Clara. It's a good sculpt that captures her design very closely. Anyway, I sculpted her from plasticine originally and over time she's gotten bashed and beaten a little, so I cleaned her up and set to work making her a more permanent fixture.

1. So we take our finished sculpt and break her down to a moudable form.

- We take back the hair, ears and eyebrows (they could of stayed for this exercise but it was funnier to see her without them). This creates an easier form on which to create a seamline for the two part mould (so called because we will end up with two parts. A top and a bottom.)

The idea moving forward is to mould the sculpt into two haves, the top with the face detail and the bottom, or back of the head. That way we will have two halves that can be separated to release the sculpt from within.

If you're confused, hopefully all will become clear as we go along.

2. With Clara all ready to go, we do what's called 'laying up'. This process is where we lay our sculpt on a flat base (as we're about to build a box around her, and it needs a solid bottom. Hehe... Bottom)

Then we add clay material (I used plasticine) around the model, creating a water tight seam around her about half way up. What we're effectively doing is cutting her in half with clay, so that only one half is exposed.

 3. Next we build up the rest of the box that will hold the plaster around our sculpt.

I've used foam board here as it's quick, cheap and easy to cut to size.

It's then pushed in against the clay and that connection between the clay and the boards then filled to make the seams watertight.

These are also hot glued together and to the base to make it solid as a rock!

4. This bit's fun! Mix up the plaster as per the packets instructions and pour into the mould.

Leave for about an hour to cure, and harden. The temperature of the environment will effect how quickly the plaster will dry as well.

5. Once cured, tear the foam board away to release the mould.

Remove the clay that we used to lay up the sculpt.

 6. Now we build up our box again on the back side and re-seal all the seams.

 7.  Once cured on the second half, release the mould!

 8. Finally, pry apart the two halves of the mould, taking care not to break it, and release the sculpt from the mould!

 And no mould is complete without the first cast. Now, the reason I moulded this particular sculpt was so that I could cast it in something more substantial and hard wearing than plasticine, so I took a push casting (which entails pushing clay into both sides of the mould and squeezing the two halfs together. Rather than a traditional casting using a liquid casting material which is pour into the mould and left to set.) using polymer clay, in this case super sculpey mixed with black fimo to give it some tone. I can then bake this to create a hard, clean replica of our original soft sculpt!

You can see the results of this little test on the picture on the right, along side the original sculpt. All in all, for my first mould it was quite successful. The mould had a few air bubbles appear in awkward places and I learnt alot to take forward for the next one!

So what next?

Well I'm going to take another casting from this mould and polish and adjust it to make a new master sculpt of what will be the end puppet. I will then mould that sculpt and produce the fully working puppet head for Clara's puppet.

But of course I'll be documenting that too so stay tuned. As always, thanks for dropping by, if you have any questions or something in here is unclear, don't hesitate to get in touch; I'll help anyway I can.


Josh.

Working hard... Full Body Sebastian Maquette and finally some Set Design.

Wahey! We're shaping up nicely now, and cooking with gas! This last week has seen alot of design progress. First and most importantly, I finally got around to drumming out this full body maquette of Sebastian! The cheeky little git :) 

I'm hoping that like me, everybody likes the design and can see the decisions I've made along the way that have shaped his features.

There's still a few tweaks to iron out before bringing him to life in a puppet, for instance, his arms currently are slightly over long and his coat could be lengthened slightly but overall I'm very happy with where he's ended up.

Another decision that some may notice is that Sebastian no longer has his monocle. I just couldn't make it fit with the rest of his facial design as he has very little mass underneath his eye for the monocle to sit on... Just one of those 2d ideas that I couldn't convincingly translate onto the 3d model. 

It's a strong idea however and I might give it another go while I'm making the actual puppet to see if I can save it :)

I'd love to hear from you all about how you like Sebastian's design as he's been a little bugger to work out. Clara happened quite naturally whilst I really had to work hard at Sebastian here....

We've got ourselves the beginning of a set design!

This week I also had just a little time to sketch out my thoughts for set design for 'The Haunts'.  The film takes place in the attic space of an old, beat up victorian mansion and I wanted to find a style and atmosphere that fit well with the characters.

The room is a simple construction, which hopefully will allow me some slack as this will be the first set that I've built by myself. The large circular window hopefully adds some nice shape contrast against the angular and straight lines of the rest of the build, whilst also allowing for some strong lighting decisions and chances for silhouette.

That's all for this week. I'm finally getting a grip on the finer details of the design for the film and in the coming days I'm going to be pinning down all the finer elements of the storytelling and then we'll really be rocking and rolling.


I hope you're enjoying following along, and if you are feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

As always, thanks for dropping by.

Josh.

Ah, Finally!

Heeeeelllooo Ladies and gents! It's been almost a week since my last post and it's been a massive auld slog! If you're in anyway creative, you'll probably at some point go through periods where you just can't get your ideas out in a manner that you're happy with. This leads to massive frustration and head banging on tables because you come to realise the only way to battle this thing is to work through it. The volume of output I've had this week is minimal. The volume of work is huge! I've drawn more than I ever had and all because I just could not get around my ideas with my current skill set.

So what was so challenging?

 For a while now I've been unhappy with Sebastian's design. It needed tweaking but I didn't know how... I knew that I liked some parts of the design and hated others. I felt he was a little bland, had not enough shape and size variation and lacked certainty and consistency. So I set about nailing down his design in a model sheet.

So what's changed?

Like I said, the guy was boring and lacked enough variation in the size relationships between his facial features to keep him interesting, however I didn't want to push things to so far that it become to broad and cartoony.

So I did two things : 

1. Enlarge his eye brows.

2. Shrunk his eyes a little

3. Made a feature of his chin.

These were the decisions that were made. The brain work before the physical drawing began.

The bad, terrible, drawing...

The overly drawn, and complicated... 

The overly simplistic and imprecise...

And the badly modelled and slap dashily inconsistent designs... 

And that's just the face!

When it came to drawing the rest of his character, I had previously been vague and unwanting to work him out. I tried him stooped, broad chested, ploddy, light footed - nothing seemed to work and my drawings suffered a great deal from my inability to draw as well as I would like.

So I turned to Milt Kahl. As I do.

Taking a look at how such a genius drafts man tackled larger, plumper characters and from here I took inspiration for shape variation and indeed, how to draw those shapes. If you're going to steal. Take from the best.

Eventually though, well today... I managed to breakthrough and figure out the design which I had been striving for. I hope you guys like it. Now all I have to do is build him :)

More soon,

Thanks for dropping in.

Josh.

Hey guys, just checking in real quick to show you the traditional stuff that I've been working on in the last few days. I'm itching to animate but currently don't have a camera or puppets to wrestle with so I broke out the paper and pencils to test out some rotation with Sebastian. My drawing isn't amazing but it serves the purpose. I'll have a longer shot for you before the week is out. Hope you like! Cheers for stopping by.

More Maquettes!

Right-ee-ho! Good day to you all. It's late and I'm typing fast. It's been a bank holiday weekend and I've been working hard. There's been a possibility that's arisen recently that I may be able to collaborate with a wonderfully talented costume maker on this film now...

While I was looking to do everything on this by myself, costume is the only field in which I am left completely adrift. I couldn't tell a cross stitch from a cable stitch (or other such haberdashery terms).

And so, this brought to mind the fact that I absolutely need to nail down the design of these guys. Obviously with each sculpt I do, I find new angles, new lines and the design gets shaved and poked closer and closer to a final design but basically that's what the maquette above is built to do.

The pic above shows you the original colour of the baked clay sculpt on the left and the quick digital paint over I gave her to illustrate her colour scheme, on the right. I apologise for the poor lighting which has washed out her features in the front view.

I needed a sculpt to illustrate the shapes and lines I was after for Clara's clothing, and I think I'm happy with what I've hit upon. It's a design taken from my idea of what victorian clothing would look like on her. It has no real basis in a real world time period but suites the character and places her nicely as 'other-worldly.'

There's so much work left to do before I can move on, including a full body sculpt of 'Sebastian', which currently terrifies me. He's much more complicated and it's gonna be alot of work to recapture my initial sculpt. However, I relish the challenge.

Just another quick one this time. Hopefully I'll remember to take some more progress pics while I'm working on 'Sebastian' so you have a little more to look at.

Thanks for stopping by.


Josh.

The Usual Suspects.

Here's to the evolution of a project! So, a little pause... I've been super busy of late in my life outside of The Haunts, and have had a stall in the funding of the project (which is my own money :)), which has slowed down the initial momentum of the project.

Unfortunately there's now no way I can make this in time for the Virgin Media Shorts deadline, which I was hoping to hit. However the film is still alive as ever!

This week I've been working on more design issues. As you can see above, I'm working on size comparison between characters and other such goodness.
And also the film now has a Facebook page!!
So come join the party over there! We'd love to see ya!

I'll have a lengthier post on model sheets and the work I've been doing up by the end of the week!

And soon my friends, very soon, there will be puppets afoot!

I can't frickin' wait! I'm trying to slow myself down a little and make sure I've done my ground work before diving in to the fun of making puppets, but they're on their way!!


Thanks for dropping by,


Josh.

Costume changes!!

Just a quick one today, written from my iPhone cos I'm working on the go! I'm a hip young artist after all, there's no standing still aloud! Having said that, it's time for a sit down :)

I just wanted to post some of my more recent pre prod art work, some of you will have already seen most of it. 

Basically, Sebastian has had a costume change! 

The thinking behind this is that while, the gardener type attire that I had originally envisioned was perfectly good and executed a wonderful little joke about a gardening fork for a walking stick, the character that went along with that didn't quite fit with the rest of the film. That is the major thing I'm learning about character design that may help anyone else in the same process; 

the characters do not live by themselves. You're not just designing a character but an ensemble and a whole film. 

So I've started playing around with different attires and attitudes and body shapes whilst maintaining the essential features of the characters face. Take a look!

This was a quick sketch of an idea that I then worked into a quick colour revision, using pen, pastels and a craft paper sketchbook! :)

I've been drawing a lot this week, trying to figure out the personalities of Sebastian and Clara on paper.

Also this week I've been experimenting with armature design in practise, building simple armatures to test out design ideas and to figure out what is essential in my puppets.

Things are chugging along nicely here at haunts HQ!

Thanks for looking guys.

Josh