Marionette - Behind The Scenes

so I was rooting around in the depths of folders on my laptop looking for something and ran across this nugget of gold! The reference material we shot (or the best edited pieces, many more were found and not used!) for Marionette to help with the animation process. Very fun to watch and was edited together with the aim of playing the storyboards, reference material and then final shot alongside each other at the graduation show at AUCB enjoy the top notch acting and camera work!

Marionette - Behind The Scenes 

Making the Stop Motion set base

Whilst working at Professor Puzzle I came across a small pallet that looked perfect for a stop motion set base so grabbed it as it wasn't being used and got it back to Kingston. I then started looking online for some perforated steel to use in the middle of it and found some on ebay.

The pallet was a bit big and the metal was only 250mm deep so we decided to cut the pallet in half. Luckily Steve who I am now living with has a massive shed full of tools and equiptment that made all this possible!

I let Steve use the tools as well! After cutting the pallet in half we attached some wooden supports onto the side we cut giving the pallet some extra support

Then it was time to cut the whole on the top to drop the metal into that will form the walking platform for any stop motion characters. The 250mm depth was perfect but the piece of metal was 1000mm wide so had to be cut down to fit within the pallet.

We drilled holes into the top to drop the jigsaw into and then cut out the rectangle needed. You can see the sharpie line where we are going to cut the metal on the third image. The fourth image shows the lip we nailed in to drop the metal onto and would then secure it to once in place.

As you can see the metal fitted in and was secured down by some screws, we then screwed in some pieces of wood to act as supports underneath to stop the metal from sinking as a character walked across the top. Stumpy stands nice and tall on the metal being held in place by the magnets underneath his feet shown in the image above. Stronger magnets are going to be needed for walking and more exaggerated poses as the clay body is quite heavy, I'm glad to see progress being made and hopefully have some animation tests coming out soon!

Making Stumpy

So I recently got paid and decided to spend a bit of money on some stop-motion supplies and make another armature and a set base and then make a whole bunch of animation tests! I bought pretty much everything I needed through http://www.animationtoolkit.co.uk/ going for the basic wire armature and then some newplast clay and a rig-it stop motion rig that I still need to figure out how to attach to the basic wire armature? Having made armatures before for Marionette and the wire armature coming with all of the pieces I found the process enjoyable and stress free. My old laptop shutting down during the time lapse photography I did through Helium Frog did my head in. I'm pretty happy with the final result as I'm mainly going to be using this puppet who got named Stumpy due to his lack of hands for tests and getting back into animating again after a quite large break! The set is still to be built as I need to get all of the supplies to my house so that can be the project for next weekend.

The start of the basic wire armature, I had to cut the wire to size to get the proportions right and then twist two pieces together and then screw into the holding positions. It was a very nice and easy armature to build

The final armature and then the milliput bones that I mixed together and sculpted onto the wire

Having not really ever used clay sculpting and messing about with it was quite a lot of fun! I would roll out the size I needed for a leg or arm and then slice it down the middle and sandwhich it onto the wire and then smooth it all down. The armature also came with some eyes that I drew on, the final outcome ended up looking like a morph/wallace/shaun farmer/mary & max mush. Click on the link below to watch the time-lapse

Making Stumpy Time-lapse

Website update!

My website is now nice and updated and ready to get me some work! Check it out

http://matthewwierenga89.wix.com/showreel

World Traveller

After graduating I worked like a dog and saved and saved and eventually had enough money to travel round the world! The trip was fantastic and one of the best times I have ever had in my life. I won’t go into too much detail as you can check out my facebook for all of the information and cool stuff I did but some particular highlights include:

• Bungee Jumping 216m on the Garden Route in South Africa
• Addo Elephant Park & Ingwelala & The Kruger Park all amazing game driving experiences
• Great White Shark Cage Diving at Seal Island
• Feeding Dolphins at Shark Bay
• Snorkelling The Great Barrier Reef
• Going to Hobbiton & Weta
• Whale Watching

I’ll post some photos below but check out my facebook albums were there are tons more if you want to see! Hope to be posting more fun things up here once I’ve got myself settled and moved up to Kingston, I’ve got lots of interesting ideas all ready for making!

Marionette

Away for a very long time...

I have been busy and away from blogger for a larger period of time now and really need to get back into the habit of making frequent posts! Since my last post in my second year of the BA (Hons) Animation Production course I have gone on to make a graduate film and graduate myself! Since then I saved up and travelled round the entire world and now find myself back at my parent’s new house in Manaccan, Cornwall. The next two post will get this blog back up to scratch and up to date starting with my third year and the increasingly successful stop motion short Marionette!

My pitch was a bit rushed after China and was not picked by my fellow third years to be made into a film so I hastily rounded on what I thought were the best looking films for my talents and was picked by Tom and Frayah onto the wonderful pitch of Marionette at that point a working title (obviously it stuck) We then spent the rest of the year, alongside fellow third year Carmen developing the story and ideas and working it into a storyboard. We then took the storyboard and developed that into an Animatic and started to get in contact with music and sound designers to produce some sound for the short film. My job on the film was to produce, animate, design and build sets, characters and props alongside developing the story and working on the shots in terms of lights and camera angles. The film stuck to its schedule and small budget and was successfully completed by the end of the year. I could not be more proud of how it came out; it was a wonderful experience and hopefully one that I can repeat! Below I will post up some of my work and favourite bits from the production of Marionette!

Some final shots at the end, and now some extra fun reference videos and images!

I also got the great experience of working on a eight week course taught by two Framestore employees. The course was fantastic and really opened up my eyes to the post production world and the way it all works. The course was fundamental in getting Marionette finished as we had no idea how to remove rigs and work post shots into final products so it really saved the day, as did hundreds of hours spent by myself and Tom learning Nuke and slogging our way through all of the shots.

Marionette link below!

http://vimeo.com/66817790


I should also mention that Marionette to this date has now been nominated for over 10 awards and in a total of 16 festivals which is amazing! Go Team Marionette!