In our previous article, we discussed the construction of Simon, the star of our upcoming short film, ¿Bikini?. Simon was built in a particularly challenging way that would have made animation nearly impossible. Rather than fighting with physics, we decided to take a step back and order some sturdy ball-and-socket armatures instead. While we’ve worked briefly with these in the past, Simon and Artemus are the first ball-and-socket armatures to officially join the team at Stop-Mo-Studio… but they’re not the only new faces!
A warm welcome
It is with great joy that we give a warm welcome to the newest member of the Stop-Mo-Studio team, Libertad. Libertad Benavides is an immensely talented stop-motion creator. An accomplished puppet maker and exceptional clay animator, Libertad has brought fresh ideas to both Stop-Mo-Studio and ¿Bikini? Libertad is currently in the process of constructing the co-star of ¿Bikini?, Artemus, or ‘Art’ for short. And the word cute does not even begin to describe her gorgeous creations! Using balsa wood, she has skilfully carved a base for the head. His character design has evolved wonderfully with her input and creativity, and the whole team is over the moon to witness how she brings him to life.
From Man to Monster
Returning to the topic of our armatures, we had to get a little bit creative once more. Since the armatures we ordered were designed for human characters, they needed a little reworking in order to look like monsters. Simon, in particular, was originally designed to have a relatively small body, with long arms and legs. In order to achieve the correct form, we swapped out various pieces between our two sets, creating our own unique skeletons that had a more monstrous appearance. We extended the lengths of the arms, swapping the shorter arm pieces with the longer torso pieces, and added an additional joint to his neck to make it more expressive and closer to the original character design. It was a fun process, figuring out the best compilation for our monstrous creature, and the results actually worked particularly well. For Artemus, we followed a similar approach, using slightly shorter arms to give each of them a unique shape.
During our testing phase, we wrapped Simon’s skeleton in a blue bandage to get an understanding of how his frame was coming along. This actually worked surprisingly well, offering a quick and easy way to cover the armature and transform Simon into a fairly appealing test dummy. But while this early prototype certainly gets us one step closer to completion, it’s far from an ideal solution. Without a covering layer, the contrast of materials between their heads, bodies, and hands would be particularly jarring, so the next step will be figuring out what to cover the bandages with. So far, we’ve experimented with a thin layer of clear silicone; however, this created a slightly strange, almost wet texture. To correct this, we will be experimenting with different materials over the next few weeks to find a solution, possibly taking inspiration from our original puppet, whose skin was created in a similar way using pigmented silicone over white bandages rather than clear silicone on colourful bandages.
In other news…
Meanwhile, production planning is starting to take shape! With the script edging its way towards completion, we find ourselves at the exciting stage of doing script breakdowns, sketching up storyboards, and considering sets and locations. With summer coming to a close, it’s the perfect time of year for pulling together projects like this one, and boy, are we excited to get moving. As we fall further down the rabbit hole and into the Wonderland that is creating a stop-motion short film, we’ll be sure to keep you all updated with our progress as we go. Now that our skeletons are sorted and our stars are being born, ¿Bikini? is beginning to take shape. Up next, we’ll dive deeper into our puppet-making techniques, with a focus on facial expressions and character movement tests.
