Expression sheets

These are some of the expression sheets for my characters

TED

CINDY

TERRY

DIANE

GEORGE

LISA

Character Profiles

These are the Character profiles for all the character in my film 

TED

This is the Final look of my main character Ted.

Now the only problem will be to make him !!!

Character design

Here are some of the initial sketch ideas for my main character Ted. Ted will be the only animatable 3D puppet in my film the rest will all be drawn and animated in 2D then printed, cut out and re-animated in stop motion on my sets. I went through many ideas and took influence from other artists and characters before settling on my final character. I knew I wanted Ted to be Skinny as I find it easier to make and animate a thin puppet so for designing I only really concentrated on the look of  his head and face.

Initial Ideas

To show you guys my Idea and explain what my film is about I will use the slides and pictures which  I will be using in my pre production folder. Later on I will be posting my character and set designs and also my animatic to give you some Idea of what Im hoping the film will be like, but for now here is some of the written work explaining a few things to get you started.

Film Premise 

World/Setting

Content and Context

Story Outline

Final Major Project Begins

So we are starting our final 3rd year Major Project. We begin with all our design and flat work, followed by pre production which for me will consist of armature and puppet  building, casting, moulding and clothes making, and also set and prop building as my film will by in stop-motion. Finally it will be production where I animate my final university film. The idea which I have is quite ambitious especially as Im doing it on my own and will take a lot of  work but as it is my final film I want  it to be good and to use all Ive learned from the last few years from everyone around me staff and students to create the best piece of work I can. So over the next few months I will be posting updates of how all my work is coming along and hopefully by the time its all over have a film Im proud of at the end.

Mime Project

For the next part of our first university project we had to animate a mimed seen with a basic armature frame.

I reused an armature which I bought in first year so  all I had to make were hands, hard chest piece to help with animation and a head. 

To make the hands I just used a basic technique as we were getting marked on animation and not puppet build. To make the hand i first twisted some strands of wire to make basic hand shape 

I then added some brass tubing to wrist and glued it on with some epoxy resin so as I could attach it to my armature

Then using flesh coloured funky foam I traced around my wire hand

I cut out the funky foam and sandwiched the wire hand in between the two halfs

Lastly I cleaned up the hand with small nail scissors and repeated process for the other hand

To make the body and inner core of the head I used balsa wood. I glued strips of balsa together with gorilla glue and once dry I sanded it into the desired shape

I made the head out of sculpy with a balsa wood core. I used two beads for the eyes and made the hair, eye brows and mustache out of plasticine. It was a really basic head and didn't need to consider much such as mouths as it was mime and no lip sync was involved.

here is some picture of the final puppet.

This is a video of my Final Animated Mime Sequence

If this does not work here is the link to it on my youtube page

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOMGHOxGyyE