Sarah Roberson: Independent Study Part 1

Concept:
I've always been fascinated with Stop Motion Animation for as long as I can remember. I grew up on Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run among others. I've always enjoyed the aspect of how you can take frame by frame and barely move something and it turn out awesome.

For my birthday this last year, I went and saw Kubo and the Two Strings (Some Sets Pictured Below) and was really fascinated with the quality of work and how long it takes just to make one complete minute of this. This is my inspiration behind the entirety of this Independent study.

I have also created my own Stop Motion Animation for a class my first semester here at UT Dallas. The characters were already made since I was using Legos to create the scene so there wasn't much work involved in it. It was really a fun animation to make and I really enjoyed the process of it.

I was talking over with a friend of mine after I went and saw Kubo and he really encouraged me that maybe I needed to do an independent study that explores how to make the models and also to do a Stop Motion for my Capstone project. The more and more I thought about it, the more and more it seemed interesting.

Materials: 

I have discovered there are many ways you can make the models. You can have ball and socket joint armatures, or a silicone body. There are even many ways you can make the faces. So I explored the ways to make the puppets and help make them alive.

I ran into the issue where the ball and socket models were expensive. (Links to the pictures to the first three below here) So I found other ways to make them. These two methods really stood out to me because visually they seem very sturdy as a model should be. I really liked the spine in the first three pictures and how it wasn't a wire itself, it seemed more organic. 

I then plan on buying Sculpy clay and sculpting the parts that I need to make feet or shoes or whatever needs to happen in each model. These two armatures above aren't the only ones I want to try, but are the main ideas I want to use to make them.

 I then plan on using the mold making and casting techniques. Such as the picture below. In researching what the best material is for making the parts of the model that require mold making, I have found that Silicone is the best way to make it. Once the wire armatures and the clay pieces of the character  are also created it will be used to create the cast.

Objective:

My objective for this project is to learn what is the best way to make the models. Since I plan on using these models for my capstone, I want them to reflect on the characters that I am creating for it. Right now, I plan on creating a female and male model to begin with, exploring ways to make the models using the techniques above. I also want to try my hand at creating a creature, which I plan on making a dog. 

In the end, I hope to have at least five models, all exploring different ways of making the models. Whether that be the armatures inside are different, to explore ways of getting good range of motion out of the models, or the materials that the characters will be made out of entirely, that is what I hope to explore in this study.