Drowndown Character Design

These are my initial character designs for the three protagonists of the music video I made for You Are Wolf's song, Drowndown. A mother and her young daughter are travelling through a forest when a mysterious river spirit tries to lure the little girl away from her mother, taking her to her beautiful watery realm beneath the river. 

I drew inspiration for the designs from The Secret of Kells and The Little Prince. The colours draw upon autumnal forest colours for the girl and mother, and water, river colours for the spirit. I played about with making the spirit more of a greenish blue colour palette, however this made her too ominous looking for the narrative. For even though she is luring people away to an underwater world, she is not really bad or good, as she symbolizes the power of rivers and of nature, where it can be both beautiful and deadly.

This is the girl's armature, made from aluminium wire and miliput. She is a small puppet, only 9cm in height.

Armatures from left to right - girl, mother, spirit. The girl and mother both have not and bolt tie down systems in their feet to hold them onto the stage during animation, but the spirit does not as her feet never touch the ground - in all her shots she is either hovering in the air, sitting, or swimming. The spirit was suspended from a flying rig or tied down with wire when sitting on her rock.

Drowndown Music Video For You Are Wolf

I'm so happy to be able to share the music video I made for Drowndown by You Are Wolf!! It took 4 months to make and has now officially been released.
You can buy the song here: https://youarewolf.lnk.to/keld
I'll be posting lots of behind the scenes photos soon!

Production Design for Escape

I recently had the opportunity of working on a very powerful short film called Escape, directed by Alex Falconer. The film tells the true story of a woman escaping from a domestic violence relationship with her three children. The film was shot over two days in a family home.

I was the production designer and was in charge of sourcing props and dressing the rooms. I needed to make the house look very tidy as the woman would have been expected to keep it looking immaculate by the husband and it also needed to be quite minimalistic with very little personality, to reflect the years of oppression the mother and children had endured. Once shooting was over I had to return the house back to its original state.

The film is now in post production, so it will probably be a while before I can share it, but so far its looking like it will be a very moving and harrowing tale.

Habaneros Burrito Bar Presents: The Chilli Man

Here is the completed advert for Habaneros Burrito Bar!! Hope you enjoy!

Here are some behind the scenes photos of the set and me in the midst of animating. Check out the completely DIY flying rig I fashioned from bits of scrap in my 'you never know when this will come in useful' box of random oddments.

The Mexican Wrestling Chilli Man

A few more photos of the Chilli Man, he is such a poser.... :)

Chilli Man 360

Turnaround of The Chilli Man.

Creating The World Of The Chilli Man

Here's a little look at the making of the set for The Chilli Man advert that I've been making for Habaneros Burrito Bar. I needed a set depicting chilli plants growing from the soil. I wanted there to be lots of chillies on the plants to make the scene bright and colourful.

The shape of the chilli plants is inspired not only by the real thing but also the Habaneros' branding, which depicts 2D chilli plants, where the curls of the plant are more angular and change in thickness at their bends. I made a wire armature first, before wrapping it with green tissue paper, using a little PVA to keep it in place.

I then stuck angular tissue paper leaves on to the plant.

I made the chillies from air dry clay, with wire embedded in them (this would act as a stem which I could tie round the chilli plant to attach them to it), I sanded them and then painted them with acrylic inks, to give a more vivid colour.

One of the chilli plants, decked out with chilli peppers.

I created a soil like texture from papier mache. My first attempt at soil created a very realistic effect but I felt this did not fit with the stylised aesthetic I was going for, so found a cleaner, simpler look that still conveyed the idea of soil. My first attempt involved mixing crushed up cornflakes and oats into brown paint and painting this texture onto card.

The loose soil is simply coco pops! I needed this to be movable for when the Chilli Man emerges from the soil.

Here's a photo of my first soil attempt, so glad I kept experimenting as it definitely looks better when made in a cleaner style!

To allow the Chilli Man to pop up from the soil, I  needed to create a trapdoor for him to come through. I bolted some cardboard to the back of the stage to create an overhang, cut a circular hole in the centre of it and glued foam under the hole, so that loose soil could sit on the foam before the Chilli Man emerged, and was flexible enough that he could push up through it. I was using an old fashioned flying rig to hold the Chilli Man in place.

A photo of the foam trapdoor. I painted it brown so that if it was in shot at any point it wouldn't look out of place.

 For the background I painted a big piece of foam board with acrylic paints, depicting a forest of chilli plants.

Lastly, I made some papier mache rocks/pebbles and paper leaves to add a bit more interest to the scene.

The Chilli Man Puppet

Last month I was commissioned to make an advert for Habaneros Burrito Bar and was very excited to put together the 'Chilli Man' concept. The idea was to show the chilli going from farm to plate, and what better way to show this than with a stop motion chilli growing out of the ground and racing his way to the burrito bar, ready to be used in chilli sauce. The chilli was also going to be a Mexican wrestler, so I designed him with this in mind, as well as incorporating Habaneros' existing style and logo into the design.

I created the armature using milliput for the bones, as I needed him to be quite small, 15.5 cm tall to be precise.

I used foam to create the bulk of his body and coated the hands in liquid latex, tinted bright red.

After much experimenting with different materials and techniques, I decided to use latex pure and simple for his skin, and so coated his whole body in it, keeping the layers a thin as possible, as latex adds a lot of weight and if applied too thickly causes resistance on the spine, making it difficult to animate. It worked out very well though and my Chilli Man has a full range of movement.

I moulded his head from polymer clay which I baked and then painted black. I then bulked it out with foam.

I hand dyed and stitched this little Mexican wrestling mask, based on the skull logo of Habaneros.

To make the cape, I cut a piece of paper to the size I wanted it and then drew around this onto my fabric.

I drew out a template of the skull logo on paper, cut it out and then drew round it onto the fabric, drawing in the details.

I used the pencil guidelines to stitch the skull onto the fabric. 

The cape needed to animate, so I got a piece of my cape fabric which would be the back of the cape. I then made a wire frame with a cross down the middle of it and glued this between two pieces of fabric, making a wire sandwich, which I then placed onto the back of the cape. I then placed the front of the cape on top of these layers. I cut the fabric layers to the size I needed (so a little bigger than the size of the cape) and then hand stitched around the edge. The wire frame meant that I would be able to animate the cape. I also used a strand of wire in the drawstring of the cape, to give more control of its movements.

Now, on my concept drawing, I had given the Chilli Man some tattoos. So I made some from latex by dipping a needle in it and drawing with it on a piece of laminated wood, allowing it to dry before adding more layers. When it was thick enough and completely dry I was able to pull it off the wood. I was then going to use more latex to glue it onto the body. However, I decided it looked better without, as although it worked in my 2D drawing, it just looked a bit cluttered when rendered in 3D.

Here's the final puppet, I will post some better photos of him at a later date, but for now, I need to get to work on the chilli farm set he is going to inhabit!