Plan for the week [2/29/12]

I need this as a mental note and a definite plan for today..

CHILDREN

• There are 23 children heads I have made, which I believe will make a good visual crowd.
• There are 23 armatures to make..
• There are 23 outfits to make.
• The color scheme for the children have been defined. 
• [I will post a picture here of the swatches]
• The tones are mauves, dark corals, and charcoal browns.
• Colorful pops of color will be incorporated as patches. There were a lot of different colors in the scheme, so to add those odd colors, I wanted to utilize the children to fill that in.
• Decorate the faces:
• I have purchased the leather to cover the faces. I plan on staining it to create more depth, and inserting beads for eyes.
• There is also the hair to consider. 'Guh'....
• I got my 50 magnets in the mail! They will be attached to the feet.
• Foam might be perfect to stuff the bodies with. Its fast and easy and morphs well with string and wire. (ribcages, arms)
• Muslin needs to be bought to make limbs and an overall covering for skeletons... I may have?

WAGON

• The cages are very important. As well as a stool for the man to sit on.. A friend offered red felt for him to sit on. I want to laser cut the outer frames and fill the inside with the mesh.. I dont have enough to make individual cages. So this allows me to fake multiple cages... 'YESSS'
• After that I need to make the connection for the horse. It consists of a bar, a chain connecting it to the wagon and the bars that reach to the horse. Not hard, I can laser some parts, Dowels have to be bought.

HORSE

• Cover the body with foam to build volume to the flat panels.
• I have bought hairy fabric for the horse, It will look great! I can cover the face and the body, I think shredding the fabric and covering the horse in planes will work the best, It will create better curves and a stylized accent. 
• Ears, Magnets, Hair from my own head for the mane and tail, Eyes.. Finishing details, and I am done!
• The harness for the cart is also important. Cover with leather to look like existing harnesses.

TREES

• Make a lot of trees. 
• Mix water and glue to create a stiffening method.
• Hang upside down to get the roots and branches to make desired shape.
• Wire for structure.
• Different scales. Large up close, small for distance perspective effects.

BRIDGE

• Damn CAN NOT FORGET ABOUT THIS.
• This is the most important element, and I have found trouble finding a magnetic surface to hide in the panels.. I must look harder, and possibly order online.
• Buy wood, yada yada yada..

ug ug ug.. yep Remind you and Me that I have a week to achieve this... One week from today. Wish me luck and time.

Just realized, that if I dedicate one day to each of these parts, that I can finish on time. I'm tired just thinking about it.

Wagon with Tarp

After deciding the color scheme, I was able to go get fabric for various parts. Sofar, the closest to being finalized is the mice wagon, all but the cages, which I believe will be lasercut with mesh inside the cut frames to make it easier and faster, and look so much nicer. I also purchased fabric for the horse, so hopefully the pair will be presentable by tomorrow night? LATE tomorrow night...

This fabric is incredible, although costly, but the stores were a bust and this was such a large part of the color theme that I couldn't replace it. The wagon is a visually large element, and will support the environment's color palette.

Well, also just because I love it too much.....

Puppets Skeleton Assembled

This was not easy.. There were so many things to fix to make sure it can function right. A ton of stuff had to be done and added to make sure that this thing will stand. Sofar it is looking promising, and it DOES STAND!, the hard part is the one leg up as it is walking.. It ends up being very heavy and the puppet cannot hold its leg in position... We will see more soon.

From here on is where the buildup of materials and repairs begin. Hot glue, crazy glue, elastic, and tape were lifesavers. I dislike how messy it ended up becoming, and realize there are so many better methods, some I have read up on more simple or complicated. I tried to do it my way, more like an action figure, but didn't have enough time to really finesse the details, so here I am doing silly things like loading up joints with all of the elastic and hot glue I can. The best I can say is that as long as it stands, move how I need it, and support itself, there is not much to complain about. In the future I will be able to perfect some sort of product worthy structure...

Evolution of the character...

Color scheme

Wagon!

Mostly finito! I need to paint over the stain with color so it won't look so crummy.

Trees

Small scale tree study, twisting newspaper to create branches... It's weak but I need to work on layering paper.

Some great feedback I got from class, They love the patterns from the newspaper itself, which I have grown to love too. I also am going to work on different types of adhesives and paper mache techniques to stiffen the paper so that it gets to the height I need.

Horses assemble!

Laser Wheels

I have begun to assemble the wheels, but forgot to cut some pieces so two wheels have to wait a bit longer..

Mice Wagon

I have begun to plan the wagon since I will have the horse soon. I have laid it out in illustrator to get the scale, and set up a file to laser cut the wheels in wood. The entire wagon may be laser cut, it also helps that I have a key to the room 24/7 ha! So that will be progressing very soon, hopefully it should be ready for finishing by Monday... goodbye weekend!

Here I have all of the parts color coded. The blue and green are 2 types of springs, I think the green one will be more structurally sound. The overall scale is 12" x 8" about.

These are the wheels in cross sections, once cut I'll laminate them together, the star is representing the spokes, but instead of cutting that out, I saw skinny square mahogany dowels that would look great, strong too.

re

Making a Horse

Watch me make a horse from start to finish! See how I do it, how I mess up, and the work that goes behind one of these puppets. sorry the quality is crap.. i don't know why uploading it makes the resolution so bad..

From here I realized that it isn't strong enough to stand on its own without moving. It ended up being structurally weak even though I was able to get the movement of the joints right. So to salvage the hours I spent working on this, I reinforced it with tubes and pipe cleaners to make a brace for the legs. It ended up working perfectly and I am able to move onto the head...

There was a lot of tightening involved with the shoulders and the joints. It is partly due to the materials, paper isn't the best but I was more focused on the price of the materials. 

(I have spent a ton on the skeletons of the people, resin and leather isn't cheap, and there are masses of materials still to buy. It is a subdominant feature in the scene, but still, I would love it to be as good as possible.) 

So tons of pipe cleaners and hot glue are required.

[More videos to come]

Skeletons!

Speaking of magnets, The skeletons have also come in the mail! Very exciting since so much of this project rests on this one component. Probably the entire film if you really think about it. So here at last thanks to Shapeways, the man and boy skeleton. I regret that it was so much, but in the time I have and what I can guarantee, it needed to be done. I believed that it will work and was really interested on modeling a figure in CAD and seeing it be printed physically. I see that I could have just cut up an action figure since that is what I based it off of...
Anyway, it came almost perfect, all of the ball and socket joints that are working could use some more friction, but that will be solved when I begin to cover it with clothes. Some were frozen into the joints, the secondary shoulders froze but not a loss, and the head socket froze. I need to fix or reprint the head. As for the magnet post, the torso and hip joints will be held and supported by magnets to make up for heaviness and looseness.

Horse

There are some great videos to be posted on how the horse is made, until then, here is a photo of what has been done up to now.

Magnets Do Anything

My magnets just came in the mail! Super cheap and nothin short on amazing, they are small and crazy strong. I plan on using them on the feet, but I just discovered that they are great spring substitutions for the inside of the puppet. I stuck one inside the ball and one on the wall of the socket so that it holds the parts tightly together. This allows it to support itself easier and creates better friction.

Scene Rendering

Vacuumed Molds to Plastic Masks

The first step has been completed, now we still have cast the faces.

SmoothOn makes a plastic resin that turns liquid to solid in 30 minutes. Mold release has been painted on the mold before mixing and pouring the resin.

I wish I had a better picture for you, Here are the final results! Some are the backs of the heads with carved faces, so not to waste time or the molds. They worked out well and they are still lightweight, and I love the idea that they are masks instead of a head, masks can be more expressive and is easier to attach to a body.

Start to finish: Carvings, Molds, Castings, and then an experimental casting... 

I saw a bag of sawdust in the shop so i scooped some up and thought how it would look casted with some wood glue mixed in.. Wood glue + Sawdust = Gingerbread dough.. mush the dough into the cookie molds..

The face came out well, the finish was rougher though. It was decided that I will have to finish the faces anyway, this would require more work and an overnight curing time. This was definitely more hit and miss, so I felt safer with the resin.

Heads to Masks

I allow myself to get ahead of myself so that I don't waste time thinking and have more time fixing mistakes I have made. Bad strategy, maybe, but I end up learning a lot so I don't think I will change the way I am doing anything, as of yet.
So remember what I said about rotomolding? Yeah scratch that, I learned the plastic I used is viscous while on its way to setting, but once the reaction happens it refuses to move. That is when I needed it to move the most, so the rotomolding thing didn't work, BUT that was the only thing that changed. I am still making plastic faces, and I have quite a few of them as of today.
This is the process I went through to get to the faces:
If the picture doesn't show, click on the empty box where it should have been...

Original carved heads in balsa wood

Paper glued in between allowed the halves to split

The heads are numbered and split.

They are placed on the base of the vacuum former.

It was successful! Thank you Tech John Medley!

This is the mold, a vacuum formed sheet of plastic, now I can make multiples of one