Finished Characters and Set Design

You must please excuse our absence the last couple weeks. I lost my phone to the powers of water. On it, were a lot of photographs I had taken of our set building process. Now I won’t be able to post pictures along with my explanations. This hurt my pride, and I felt it hard to sit down and do this blog post. I have a feeling we will be building more, or at least rearranging the ones we’ve done. If so, I can get great photos of that and post it to our blog.

Set Design

We decided that our best route was using real tree branches, soil, moss, and lichen. We gathered up as much as we could. luckily for us, Skye’s mother had a property full of everything we needed. We used floral foam as the base. When I personally made a set I didn’t have a plan on where to place trees. I used my judgement with the types of branches we had and just went for it. After I put a few in, it started all coming together. After placing my branches down, I gently spread the soil over the floral foam. Making sure to cover every square inch, I used my fingers and a brush to evenly distribute the soil under branches. I would then take handfuls of of moss and lichen, and slowly drop it from above onto the forest. Moss is truly amazing. We had so many varieties to chose from. My favorite were the ones that looked like ferns.

Characters

And of course, our finished characters. It was such a great experience bringing these two to life.

In jeans!

Character Update

After a long weekend of helping out at the family homestead we are back, and we’ve finally finished our Robot!

We are super excited. Everything seems to be working properly, and we think he will move quite well! This was a very new experience for us, we definitely learned a lot.

Skye is almost done with the monster girl. The only thing missing is the skin for her legs. Skye has been taking some time to think about the best way to go about it. We have decided on using painted felt. Once we finish that up, I will post up some photos of that process and her completed little self.

The other day I built the forest set! I am really excited about the results. It’s so great to have all of the ideas in our heads come to fruition. It is the most satisfying experience. Skye is currently working on some backdrops for the sets.
Here is a sneak peak.

A side note- That little storefront has nothing to do with our stop-motion, it’s just something Skye’s grandpa gave her. They sure look cute next to it though. If you look really close you might see a hint of what’s coming next, sets that will knock your socks off! Ka-Pow!

Stay tuned!

And Away We Go!

In the first post you got to see the story boarding process we went through. Josh had a basic idea for what he wanted. Two characters and a simple plot. Skye and I took that and ran with it. It was a cool concept he was going for, and a truly amazing song. We sat in our little space and listened to the song over and over again, trying get an idea of the environment that it had already created. What we saw was dark and mysterious. The unknown. The unseen.

Having come up with our story, it was now time to bring it to life. We had such interesting characters to work with. We really wanted to steer clear of clay animation. We felt like it would not capture accurately the atmosphere and reality of the song. Instead we are trying our own approach to our characters and set design.

For our lovely little robot friend; we are using copper, steel, JB weld, wood, and various other metals.

It took a lot of arranging, taping, JB welding, and plain waiting. Lots of waiting. And believe me this guy got impatient.

Our monster lady would consist of a double wrapped steel wire skeleton. Skye then sewed together a body. She also made beautiful horns out of clay. Up close they look like mini croissants.

 

We are so close to being done with our characters. It took a lot longer then we would have hoped, but we are learning so much. Sometimes we have to fail if we are going to learn anything.

Photos of them complete soon!

After that, set design!

Stay tuned!

Jonathan