I have to pitch my new project idea 'The Librarian' to my tutors and peers within the next couple of days so I have knocked together a quick one sheet to help promote this.

As well as sprucing my website up I thought it would be a good idea to update my animation showreel. It now includes all the animation that I have done this year alongside some other bits and pieces that I hadn't showcased before. This is now living under the animation section of my portfolio but thought I would pop it on the blog for good measure. Enjoy!

Here are my findings from animation testing my three little friends. Enjoy!

Here's my completed animation test using my puppet head with the replacement mouths. The eyes went a bit (a lot!) haywire but overall I was really pleased with the actual lip sync and liked the fact that I had managed to get the beard to move with the mouth, giving it a more realistic feel.

I took my replacement mouth puppet head into the studio, and shot some lip sync under a line tester. Here he is mid-flow:

So I took my heads into the studio to do some test animation with them, here are a few shots of them in the spotlight!

Today me and other people from my course made a group animation (and got quite sunburnt in the process!)

We each had to pick a word out of a hat and draw what we were given on to the long strips of paper seen in the photo above. We then had to morph our drawing into the drawing of the person that was next to us, which when filmed would create a cyclical animation. I drew "Great Aunty Dot" out of the hat which I had to morph into Yusrys' "Teacher". I'm looking forward to seeing the animation!

I attended a workshop to learn how to make a stop-motion puppet head that has an animatable brow and jaw. Here's how I got on!

In this case we added a nose in polymorph as well. However this can be added at a layer stage either made with milliput, foam or built up with latex. I made teeth by cutting a thin strip of polymorph and whilst still malleable impressing dents at equal spacing along this to create the look of the individual teeth. I then moulding this onto the lower jaw and repeated the process for the upper jaw as well.

This is a quick animation test I did with my newly made head armature. Excuse the funny lighting, my booth had a broken light.

(When I played this back for the first time all I could think of were the aliens from Mars Attacks!)

The next stage is to build on top of the polymorph skull with milliput in the appropriate places to replicate a human skull. For example as you can see from the pictures above the cheek bones are very prominant.

Below I've put plasticine in areas where I will be doing this so that it shows up clearly on the camera.

I'll let you know of my progress in another post very soon!