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.

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.

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!

Lyra Stop Motion Puppet Photos

 

Lyra Stop Motion Puppet Turnaround

The turnaround for my Lyra stop motion puppet. This is by far my favourite puppet I have made to date!

She is quite a small puppet at 15.5cm tall.

On top of the armature there is a layer of foam for shaping the body. The hair is made from embroidery thread attached with latex to the head. The face is painted with acrylic ink, as are the eyes. The eye sockets are tinted latex, its flexible quality enabling the eyes to be animated (by sticking a needle point in the small hole in the pupils and using that to move them). The neck is also coated in white tinted latex.

The black jeans are fabric stuck onto the legs. The shoes and gloves are also made in this way. I stitched some nice burgundy cotton through the shoes to make the laces, to set them off from the grey boots. The hoody is made from dyed fabric and hand stitched, but best of all, the hood can actually function as a hood!