Bedroom Done and Dusted!

I am happy to say that the filming of the bedroom is complete, hurrah! All of the props, the set and the pasty child puppet have been completed, and Andy and George have been working like troopers these past few weeks getting the animation done and dusted for this set. I am really impressed by the animation they have done so far, it's great to see everything coming to life and the puppet looks great against the set and props. Whilst the guys are filming I have been working away in the background getting on with making props and doing bits and bobs for the corridor and shop sets, so e have a good system going on at the moment. Here are some piccies of the pasty child in the finished bedroom set:

Pasty Shop Hanging Sign

The pasty shop set is going to have a main sign stuck onto the top half of the centre wall, but we also thought it would look really nice to have a shop sign hanging from a pole stuck straight onto the shop, to make the set look more believable and add extra detail to the shop walls. I started making this prop by sawing off a small rectangular piece of thin wood to make up the main base of the shop sign. Once I had filed down the edges, I cut some wooden coffee stirrers (these have been really helpful!) into small pieces and glued them around the edges of the rectangular piece of wood to make a 3D edging. Whilst the glue was drying, I cut a measured piece of aluminium metal tubing to make up the pole that the sign would eventually hang from. Once the edging had dried onto the sign base, I covered the whole thing with a layer of poly-filler and sanded it down once dry, to cover up any cracks and disguise the wood grain:

In the meantime whilst the poly-filler was setting, I glued squares of wood I cut into shape onto both ends of the metal tube pole, one square larger than the others on one end for bigger surface area to glue onto the shop set. I also glued a plastic ball that I cut off the end of a pin, and glued it onto the smaller square end as decoration. Once this was dry, I covered the entire pole with a layer of poly-filler and sanded it down, to help paint stick later on:

To allow the sign to hang from the pole, I made two holes on either side of the top of the sign using sharp tool. Once these holes were deep enough, I glued two sections of aluminium wire into the holes to make 'loops,' so that chain could be attached later on. Now that the main structure pieces were complete, I sprayed the main sections of the pole with metallic paint. I then painted the edging around the sign and also the wooden squares stuck onto the pole with the same green paint used on the outside shop walls. Once this was dry, I painted the middle section of the sign black, and then added the text 'Mr and Mrs Leg Pasties' onto the surface with a thin brush and white acrylic paint. Now that the painting was complete, I attached some thin gold chain onto the aluminium hoops using a small pair of pliers, and then linked up the chains with small jump rings so that they could be hung from either corner of the sign:

Here are a few photos of the sign finished and hanging from the shop:

1890 Character Turn-Arounds

Oo I completely forgot to post these! Here are the character turn-arounds I completed for Insa's BMX film 1890. Insa wanted some 2D character animation in her film and needed to know how the characters she designed looked from certain angles to help with the animation. Insa gave me a few sketches on how she wanted two characters to look: one was a big muscly guy and the other a angry-looking little panda, both of which fitted really nicely with her film style. From these sketches, I had a go at drawing up some simple turn-arounds for each character in a few poses; it was quite tricky trying to think of how the big muscly guy looked from a side angle but I think they turned out ok. In comparison, the panda was such easier to draw in different angles, and I shaded in the darker areas on the character's fur in Photoshop (at some point I will colour in the muscly guy in Photoshop as well, but for the time being I left him as plain lines as I was unsure as to how he should be coloured.) Here are the results:

Crisp Stand

Lauren-Prior Smith from the second year of our course made us some fantastic props to go in the pasty shop set, including lots of teeny tiny packets of crisps. To display the crisps, we thought it would be a good idea to make a stand for them to sit in just like real bakeries have. So this was the next prop I got started on... and I am very glad it's done now because it was a tad bit tricky to make! The first section I made was the main 'stand,' which was pretty easy to construct. I simply glued a few wooden lolly sticks together and cut them into a square once they had dried to make the base. I then glued a taller piece of metal tubing onto one of the sides of the wooden square to make the main stand. It was a bit fiddly trying to fix the tube onto the wooden base because the araldite glue I was using was being stubborn and not setting. So to make the structure sturdier and add extra surface area for glueing, i glued a piece of aluminium wire across the tubing and bade to ensure that it was secure and sturdy enough to hold the crisps in the end:

I wasn't sure how to go about attaching the crisps to the stand, and initially thought it would be a good idea to bend a long piece of aluminium wire into little baskets for the crisps to sit in. This however turned out to be easier said than done, because the wire was difficult to push into place and the baskets ended up looking really messy and clumsy. So I ended up scrapping these first attempts and tried a different approach by glueing separate sections of wire to make a similar basket shape. However once again the araldite glue was misbehaving and not setting properly (I don't think I mixed it correctly and once the glue did finally set, the sections of wire easily snapped away from each other. After some torrents of foul language I gave up on the baskets and sulked over a cup of tea.

Once I had calmed down (tea is very soothing) I decided to forget about the wire baskets and instead attach a series of shelves, one on top of the other with a bit of space in between, all the way up the middle aluminium tubing stand. To do this, I followed the same process of making the wooden base by sticking together lolly sticks and cutting three equal squares to make up the shelves. The crisps would fall off the shelves without some sort of restraints, so I thought it would be good to attach a railing around each shelf. To do this, I bore a hole into the corners of each shelf using a sharp tool. This was fiddly because the wood started to splinter if you pushed too hard, so I secured the shelves with a layer of masking tape to hold their shape. Once the holes were wide enough, I cut and bent small pieces of thin aluminium wire, and carefully inserted each end of a section into the holes and secured them with superglue:

Now that the shelves were complete, I could attach them to the main stand. To do this, I glued each shelf on individually with a piece of wire behind it like I did with the base using araldite glue once again (this time I learnt my lesson and made sure I stablised it with gaffa tape and left it to dry.)I repeated the same process for each of the shelves and also attached a small piece of wood onto the top of the stand as a sign.

We thought the stand would look nice if it looked all 'metal' so I sprayed it with an initial grey undercoat and then sprayed a layer of metallic paint over the surface. However it didn't look quite right when it was all metallic, So I painted the lolly stick shelves and base a light beige colour and then brushed wood varnish over the surface to bring back the wood effect again. I left the wire a metallic colour, but painted the wooden sign the same green as the outside shop walls and added the text 'crisps' onto the surface with a thin brush and white acrylic paint.

At last the structure was finally complete, so I glued the crisp packets straight onto the shelves so that they wouldn't move during filming. Here is the finished result... phew!:

Open/Close Sign

To make the shop front look a bit more authentic, we thought it would be good to have a little open/close sign hanging from the door. It was a pretty easy prop to make, I just sculpted the basic shape out of milliput by flattening out a rectangular and adding detail around its edges with a thinly-rolled piece. Whilst the milliput was still wet, I poked the ends of a section of aluminium wire into the top corners of the sign to make the hanging part, and once the milliput dried the wire was fully set into the sign. I then coated the dried sign with a thin layer of poly-filler to ensure that the paint would stick:

Once the poly-filler had dried, I filed it into shape with a small nail file and then painted over the filler with a base coat of acrylic paint. For the finishing touches, I used a teeny tiny brush and painted the words open and close onto either side with white acrylic paint:

Pasty Shop Floor

We had been wondering for a while what to do about the pasty shop floor. It would have looked fantastic with a similar hand-tiled floor like the one I constructed for the pasty child's bedroom, however this was an extremely time-consuming (and expensive) way of doing it. So we thought of a much easier way of going about making the floor look tiled... print off a tile pattern from the computer and slap it on the wooden base floor with pritt stick, easy peasy!We did think about painting the tiles ourselves on photoshop but it seemed a bit pointless in the end. So I printed off about 10 sheets of a white and black tile pattern that we liked, and then began sticking them straight onto the wooden floor with pritt stick. It was a bit fiddly cutting and matching up the tiles in the correct order, but compared to sculpting, baking and fixing down fimo tiles it was a walk in the park! Here are some piccies of the process and also one of the finished floor fixed onto the shop set:

Finishing Touches on Shop Set

The shop set is looking fantastic, Andy has done us proud as set engineer! The inside was looking pretty bare, so we initially painted the inner walls a creamy yellow colour and Andy glued on some varnished lolly sticks around the bottom half to look like wood panelling. They look really effective, but both the walls (inside and out) and the wood looked a bit too 'new,' whereas we wanted a more battered and rustic appearance. To achieve this effect, I dry-brushed a combination of lighter and darker tones of paint over the walls to grudge up the corners and edges, and then brushed a darker brown paint over the wood panelling to create more of a shadowing effect.

For the outside walls of the shop, I used a larger brush with thicker bristles and dry-brushed black acrylic over the surface, and also touched up any mistakes or wobbly lines with the original green paint. Here are some piccies of the shop set so far, complete with some props!: