Logistics, more logistics and some fun stuff.

Well, there goes another week already. Time flies.

Most of my time has been spent researching and pre-production planning.

One of the things I have been looking into is flicker prevention, as upon testing my power points at home there is a fair bit of fluctuation in our home circuits. Basically what I will be doing is running all of my power through a light dimmer, monitored by a digital volt meter, so I can maintain constant voltage. More on that in a later post.

For now, I’ve been doing a number of things;

Firstly I did a quick hair test. I used real hair and glued it to the test head using two part epoxy glue (Araldite). It holds up to macro pretty well, and with a lengthy process of carefully glueing the hair in place should look pretty good on my final character.

Next, shoes;

Firstly I made a base plate out of Plaster of Paris (with keys molded in for later). The I sculpted some very basic shoes out of chavant NSP clay.

Next I put some flashing around the sculpted shoes and put some rods into the shoe entrances, these will create the holes where I later pour the latex through. After that I just used some petroleum jelly as mold release and casted it.

The mold came out good and bubble free. Which was a relief, as I didn’t have an air compressor to use while I was molding.

After cleaning the mold and letting the plaster set dry I did my first batch of shoes. The first batch were full of air bubbles. I came to realize that air bubbles were getting trapped inside of the mold and not allowing the latex to come into contact with plaster to let it cure. I hadn’t expected this, as I had only ever done large work with liquid latex and this had never been a problem. I found the trick was to pour a tiny bit of liquid latex into the mold, turn it around, shake it and get the latex into all of the nooks and crannies before pouring the mold full. Then just letting it cure and then turning it upside down to drain and final cure as normal. (Just note if you want to do this, its a good idea to have some baby powder to dust the final bits with when you pull them from the mold as other wise it will stick to itself).

The second batch of shoes turned out usable. I left them for a 5 hour cure time, which gave me about 1.5-2mm wall thickness on the latex. They still have some air bubbles in them, but they are internal, which just means variable wall thickness, luckily the wall thickness is thick in the right places. But yeah, the shoes are ready for a coat of PAX paint and they will be finished.

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Lastly, I have finally completed my blocking masters. As well as completing all of the 3D set models for the previz. So now I can put the two together and get my 3D previzualizations and my digital story boards done.

One of the many pages of blocking. Personally I really like to block either prior or at the same time as story boarding. You can come up with some interesting shot variations that way.

The final film (all going to plan) will have a total of 31 shots, of which 10 are dolly shots. The takes are reasonably long, so its going to be a real challenge on the animation front.

Anyway, back to work.

Cheers,

Harrie.