Ceramics Documentation 2

Another thing to mention about my ceramics is the task I was given to shape 12 little plasticine balls in a sequence. I took the principles of animation into consideration as I was making this, as I wanted to give the illusion of a ball transforming, even when seen in picture format; I even used the pose-to-pose approach upon making this. This was the sequence of images:

You can kind of gather that it's Lumpy Space Princess there, just to quickly get that out of the way, but I think you can see where I applied the principles of animation. Again, I used pose-to-pose, and I also used squash and stretch, as well as a technique known as settling, in which a character, after a squash/stretch, would squash and stretch very slightly before regaining their original form.; in this case, LSP's slight change in height after morphing. I focused a lot on timing and spacing, because since it's 12 frames long then it would have to be a quick but smooth transformation.

When I was done took a sequence of photographs with them: 

I then converted these into an image sequence on Quicktime (12fps):

I'd say it works pretty well, considering I didn't use Dragonframe or any other stop-motion animation software, nor have I ever made a claymation animation.

Other Stop Motion Clay Animation

In terms of inspiration for my 3D model, I actually thought a lot about the work by Lee Hardcastle.

I believe I've mentioned him before, back in my first module. He's basically an indie animator who specialises mainly in stop-motion claymation. They are mostly very dark and gory comedic shorts (with an upcoming feature film, Spook Train) with very odd looking characters. The claymation really suits the awkward yet surreal style of the characters, as well as the contrasting tone of humour and gore.

This was the style I went with as I was making the model. The crudeness of the style is rather easy to implicate for first-timers like myself.

Ceramics Documentation 1

Something I've unfortunately neglected to mention throughout this month was the Ceramics workshop induction. This was the first time I've ever used ceramics and found it to be a fun, and challenging experience. I have always had a love for stop-motion, plasticine, and clay animation, so I was glad I had the opportunity to try this out. We were tasked with designing a human/humanoid character that would be made into a simple 6-7 inch 3D clay model. It was a rather complicated process, actually. Basically, I had to make some flexible wires in the shape of a body, it had to match the general shape of the character I designed, then add some molding clay to the limbs, hands, feet, torso, and head. It's much harder than it sounds, in fact I may have screwed this part up because I used too much mold, they almost stuck together, which would have affected the movement of the model (It sounds complicated, I know. Basically, imagine if your bones were molded together and you couldn't bend your arms. Yeah that's basically what would happen to the model). Then I added the plasticine, a mixture of red and black, some pure black and a red streak for the hair. At this point, a lot of attention to detail was necessary, it had to match the style of the design and have the little details added to the clothing, body structure and overall anatomy of the figure; unfortunately I don't have a camera so I couldn't really show the process, but I do have pictures of the final product: