Funny Faces

After working on the armature and clay maquette for the jester character in my short, I decided to work on the head and replacement faces that I will use to give him expression. (I really wanted to mold the maquette, but I am struggling to find ultracal 30 locally. But I suppose that will be a topic of a new blog post.)

I am using silicone molds to cast the faces in resin. Its a simple process, just mix equal amounts of parts A and B to pour over a sculpt to make a rubber mold. I did this over a tile floor for easy clean up.

Various materials I used for molding/casting

For the main part of the head, I created a single part mold formed in a plastic cup. For the faces I used a two-part mold as the shape was more complex and I wanted better control of the seems. You can get a better idea looking at the pictures below.

Single Part Mold

Two-Part Mold After Resin Cast

Main Head Part With Eyes

Making the plastic parts was as simple as mixing parts A and B of the resin and pouring it into the molds. The two part mold was a bit more tricky. If you check out the pictures, you can see it had to have been made a particular way to ensure resin would fill the mold and prevent causing air pockets.

Inside of the Two-Part Mold

Face Casting

The mold I made isn't perfect, so I do have a lot of flashing and clean up for the plastic parts. I use a hobby knife to trim the flashing and thoroughly sand each face with 220 grit sandpaper to smooth out any unwanted surface texture. As you can see, I left a portion around the mouth area to fill in later. To save material and cost, I am making different mouth shapes on each face as opposed to sculpting and molding each individual mouth shape. Why didn't I just go with replacement mouths you ask? I am trying to prevent any real noticeable seems on the face that I would have to remove in post. Also, I am not a fan of the "sausage" look to lips and mouths commonly seen on replacement mouths. Its not a horrible look, but I feel it doesn't really fit the style of the jester character.

Before and After Clean up

Several Faces with Different Expressions

I use polymer clay to model the mouths on face. When baked, the clay hardens and can be sanded down to blend more with plastic it is adhered to.  So hopefully when the faces are primed and painted, the differences in materials will be totally unnoticeable.

Face Close up

Face Close up II

Jester Maquette Progress

Over the past couple of months, I have been periodically adding clay to my jester armature in order to create a maquette for molding. Its a pretty simple process at this point, just heating oil based clay to make it softer and adding the clay onto the armature. Then when the clay is blocked up on the armature, its it then sculpted and refined into a satisfactory body shape.

Front View

Side View

 I am going to make actual clothing for the jester character to wear so I made it a point not to put much detail in the body. I did put in a little more detail with the feet, giving him medieval looking footwear.

Close Up on Feet

If you have noticed a break in the neck, is was left that way intentionally. I have been working on the head and will size up the neck and head together.

Neck and Wrists Remain Open

And for the hands, I am not sure I want to mold them separate or attach them to the body. I am waiting for the final decision on the hands once I finish the head and replacement faces -which just happens to be the topic of my next post!

Armature Hands

Its been a little while since I updated my progress, so here goes! I have made hands for my Jester armature. In the past, I have just used epoxy to attach wire hands the metal rod arms. I had little success with that as the epoxy or aluminum wire would break after animating for a while. So I decided incorporate an hybrid approach.

Jester armature hand

I created a metal joint to attach to the ball at the end of the armature's arm. Armature wire is then looped through a hole in that joint and wire fingers are made around the initial loop. I then epoxied the fingers at the base to hold them in place. I can already tell that the hands feel way more solid then just wire alone.

Hand to armature comparison

The hands do not seem too out of proportion with the rest of the figure, but fine tuning will be done as I start sculpting the maquette.

Jester Armature

Since I have posted last time on this project, I have been working the armature for the jester character. In the course of the film, this character will be picked up by larger characters and rustled around. So instead of the 12 inch characters I am used to making, I actually designed the jester to be more around somewhere between 5 to 6 inches in height. And to make him look a bit more cartoonish, (you can actually see this in the last post I made) I designed his head to be larger in proportion in to the body. This really made the new design quite tricky. However, I am very happy with how the armature looks and moves.

the armature with tape measure reference

front view large

Side view large

I had made ball and socket armatures for 5 or 6 years now. Not only is this armature the smallest one I have ever built, it also uses swivel joints which I had never incorporated in an armature before. Despite needing machining to super tight tolerances, they work fantastic. The other joints I have used before, but are less bulky with fewer individual parts. I can't wait to make it into an actual stop mo puppet!

The Jester's Task...a Prelude

My newest animation, "The Jester's Task" is a short film has been in the works for quite sometime. It first came about when I was thinking about how my last short (ie my senior project) turned out quite poorly. It really struck a blow to the ego, because my film before that, "Billy and the Skeleton" turned out so well and still makes me proud to this day. To make a long story short, I found that I tried to do too much in too little time. And now that unfinished film has been scrapped, as all the work I had done was lost my old laptop was stolen in cruel twist of fate.

But not all is lost. I have been working on "The Jester's Task" for many months now and I have some material I can share with the world. I will be posting my progress gradually. There is still quite a lot to work on. If you are like me, you are just itching to see whats going on behind the scenes. I will leave you with a some concept drawings. My next post will put them in more context. Enjoy!

The Jester-with color

Knight Concept- Photo of original drawing

Ball and Socket Armature