Week 3-4 Stop Motion

Faces! Our first task was to create characters out of cardboard. We wanted them to be unique and also 3D and to make them as dynamic as possible and to use different pre-cut shapes. I did cheat a little bit on this and added the eyelashes and eyelids on the character on the left with shapes I specifically made for that purpose but other than that both faces were made from shapes that I had already cut. I found this task really fun as I enjoyed just playing around with different shapes and layers to build silly faces. I do think mine could have been built more into the cardboard and therefore even more 3D but I think they turned out pretty fun and I liked them. I also made a little fish with excess cardboard bc fish rule and I wanted to make little layered scales for it.

We also did an exquisite corpse exercise with the people that we were sat with. I did the head on Bartholomew XXVI and the body on Shrek II. I found this task highly entertaining and fun and also nice to get to know the people I was sat with a bit better. It didn’t really have much effect upon this project but it was fun and creative and enjoyable and the outcomes were amusing so I wanted to put them in.

My group (Kiki, Iman and I) immediately knew that we wanted to create a cat puppet for our puppet, we thought it would be fun and silly and also be very cute and also something that hopefully wouldn’t be too complex for us to construct. Kiki had the idea of taking inspiration from the cat masks of ancient Egypt and then also from Chinese Sichuan Opera and the face changing dances within (see examples below). We decided that we would make a cat puppet with a detachable head (which would be on a stick) and then a selection of different masks which we could change between in our animation.

When Kiki suggested the idea of using the masks and these style of transitions inspired by Sichuan opera, she showed us a couple of different clips from performances to show us what she meant and we thought it was super cool. I really like how seamless the transitions are and how you can’t even see the masks change it’s just that one minute it is one mask and then the next minute it has changed from a simple change and gesture. As the brief required us to include some kind of transformation for our puppet, this idea really worked well conceptually as we could then create our transformation using the different masks and change them out using different movements and gestures rather than taking apart our puppet or doing something which could easily become overcomplicated.

I sketched up an idea for what we could want our cat character to look like, we wanted him to be on two legs with arms so that we could have more dynamic and human-like movement and wouldn’t have to worry about manoeuvring the puppet like a real animal would move. We would give him joints on his knees and elbows and have sticks attached at these joint points so that we could hold him up and move him around easily. Having this simplistic turnaround and design idea helped a lot with building our puppet as we knew what we wanted him to vaguely look like and where our key focus for joints and motion should be and we could refer back to.

I took some inspiration from the character of ‘Puppycat’ from Natasha Allegri’s 2013 – 2022 animated series ‘Bee and Puppycat’. For a cat design, to me puppy cat will always be a standout character and point of reference for both mannerisms and design with his soft and round shape which is both like a puppy and a cat (hence the name) and his very dynamic and expressive face. I like how simple puppy cat’s face is and yet it can convey so many emotions very simply so I thought that if we wanted our cat (Mr Meow Meow) to be more expressive but not overly complex if we gave him simple features like Puppycat, this could be quite effective. I also liked the idea of our cat standing on two legs and having arms so looking at the way Puppycat moves in a way which isn’t quite human yet is still animal-like was interesting to observe.

Creating Mr Meow Meow was certainly a task. It was very difficult to build a puppet from scratch with nothing underneath as a proper support system and just cardboard and newsprint as the main materials for us to use. We started with creating Meow Meow’s head so that we could base the scale of the rest of the body from this point. I was tasked with creating the head and to try and make it more solid I cut a simple cat shaped template out and then I put 3 cardboard supports on either side of the head and stuffed it with newsprint. Once I had this base layer, I peeled the surface off of cardboard sheets and then used pva glue to paste these on top in layers until it felt quite solid and sturdy. Once I had done this, I cut the little face details out and simply hot glued those on. Iman worked on building the base structure of the body building it up with newsprint and then I coated it in the same cardboard layers and pva glue combination as the head. The hardest part of creating this puppet absolutely had to be the arms and the legs as they weren’t just solid blocks but they actually had to be able to move. We decided to do the legs in 2 pieces and then attach those pieces to each other using some wire in the joints so that they would have some support in bending them, we then layered the surface the same as the body and head and hot glued them to the body, but then we discovered when testing moving him that this would not work as it really inhibited our range of movement so we peeled this off and reattached them using tape so that they could move more freely. Whilst this seemed effective, we came to discover during filming that we definitely should have done something more secure than this as they came loose incredibly easily after a lot of movement. For the arms we attached them into the body using wire (as though it were pins) and made the joints in the arm by just leaving them looser than the rest of the arms and their covering. For added catness and cuteness we gave Mr Meow Meow little paws just because we thought it would be a sweet detail to add and we gave him a tail as well. We attached sticks to all his joints and then the back of the body so that we could support him and one on the back of the head so that we wouldn’t have to attach it to the body of the puppet which would make the change of head/masks a lot easier when filming. We did find that once we finished, the puppet was a lot heavier than we initially had anticipated so we knew we would have to have at least two people supporting him when he would walk and we would also need for him to possibly be supported from string at certain points during filming so that it would be easier for us to create the movements and changes that we wanted to do for our transformation.

Shape transformations! To get used to using Dragonframe, the lighting in the stop mo room and consider different transformation types, we were given the task of creating a small animation test where we transitioned from a circle, triangle and square and back to whatever shape we started with. I was responsible for the circle and I made it grow and shrink before it turned into the square, Kiki and I were already familiar with using Dragonframe so it was quite a simple task for us to use the software but we did have to take some time to consider the task and work out how these transitions would work but once started drafting and considering ideas it clicked and we pulled together to make this which, in my opinion, looks pretty cool.

As you can tell from these images, filming with our puppet proved to be quite a struggle at times. We had a member of our group missing on our first day of filming which is when we realised that Mr Meow Meow was definitely a two person puppet so we had to come up with some creative solutions for filming which involved us putting the camera on a timer to take frames at a steady pace and also just a lot of balancing and propping up of Mr Meow Meow with pins in his feet which we would remove and replace after every movement and sheer will, as well as a helping hand from some friends. Once we got through the walking section of the animation, it was less of a challenge as we were able to attach some elastic to the back stick of the puppet and stand him up and pin his feet down to the board. We definitely used the dark lighting to our advantage to hide hands errors and bits of string and pins we were using to keep him upright. As you can see, we did have a few casualties when filming as our puppet lost his entire legs or half his legs due to the way that they were attached so we had to keep taping him together and simply hoping that he would hold as if we moved him too much some other part would break. Fortunately, at this point in filming his legs were no longer in shot and we were more focusing on changing the heads around and creating transitions with his arms so it made it a lot easier to just pin him together however was necessary to get through the filming. But it did all pull together in the end and despite these casualties it worked out just fine and you can’t see a lot of these errors or the changing of tape throughout our animation.

Oh Mr MeowMeow we’re really in it now. I really enjoyed this project, I adore stop motion and had never created a puppet of this size before or a functional puppet without a wire armature underneath so it was really fun to be able to experiment with it and try out something new. Cardboard and paper were a real limitation when building our puppet as it was hard to make him really stable without a proper structure, but masking tape and duct tape were really useful in helping to keep small elements and joints together as well as a lot of hot glue. For our transformation, our focus really lay upon the changing of heads/masks for our puppet and the transitions between each of these faces with different dance-like movements – taking inspiration from Sichuan Opera’s face changing dances. Whilst we had some challenges when animating with our puppet due to the weight and size of it and the lack of structural integrity, we found that the lighting could hide an array of errors and the support measures we had put into place to keep our puppet upright. I think the most challenging part of the animation was definitely the walking and picking up the head at the start of the animation as we had to keep our puppet stable and upright enough with one person handling the puppet, keep ourselves out of shot and make the walk look at least look like a somewhat convincing walk cycle.  We found that putting pins in the feet between each shot for whichever foot was in contact with the ground in that moment was the best way to stabilise Mr Meow Meow and then cut to a different perspective when he would be picking up his head so that the stick would be less noticeable and it would be easier to shoot. Overall, I was really pleased with how the animation turned out and despite the flaws in our puppet they were less noticeable once it all came together and was lit and people didn’t seem to notice them and thought that our puppet looked sturdy, my favourite part was probably creating the different movements for the face transitions especially where he dips back into the darkness and the face changes or when his head drops off again at the end. One thing I would have developed and improved upon given more time other than the construction of the puppet is making the different personalities for the masks more obvious, either making them more drastically different or making the gestures more clearly characterised but I think it was still effective and a good transformation nonetheless.