Spangler Studios Blog

This is a very rough animation test, done over a month ago, testing character interaction as well as a somewhat unsuccessful method of rigging that I like to call “the umbilical cord.” If you look closely, you can see that both characters are attached to a long wire that is covered with tissue paper and glue and painted dark colors to blend in with the background. This method worked alright for a quick test, but overall it was difficult to position the characters because of extreme “bounce-back” from the long wire, and the cord is quite obvious when it passes in front of a light color (or in front of the character itself!). Since this was a test, I didn’t make it so that the wire could be removed and repositioned when necessary. I think a better method would involve using straight metal rods with joints, maybe with bendable wire at the end closest to the puppet?

I should note that I’m attempting to rig the puppets externally, in a way that blends well enough with the look of the world that the rigs will not need to be removed digitally and will instead be accepted as part of the animation style. Even though this test proved a bit difficult, I enjoyed the freedom of not worrying about drilling holes to tie down the feet after each move, and also not thinking about rig removal.

Last week, the shrewmole film (tentatively titled “The Duvetyne Shrewmole”) was awarded a production grant through the LEF Moving Images Fund for New England artists. I’m very excited and looking forward to taking some time out specifically for work on this film. I will continue to post updates and share what I learn along the way.

Below is an image gallery of the test set I put together. Everything is made of pretty economical materials - aluminum foil, wire, cardboard, brown paper. The set elements are mostly on movable flat layers, except for the bigger flowers and the ground surface.
(click on the big images to advance)

Hello all! Sorry that my site has been down. I didn’t realize the problem until a few days ago, but now it is fixed.

A while ago I made another puppet, a mouse, using the nylon over cotton soft scuplture techinique (no foam this time, which didn’t work as well). It was cute, but kind of weird, and just needed some kind of fur or fuzz. Well I came across some very cute and fuzzy felted mouse puppets online and immediately ordered some wool and felting needles and felted the wool fuzz right onto the puppet. It’s really long fuzz, but I like it better than the naked look, at least for the mouse.

Here are some photos of the puppet-making process (in reverse):

(click on the smaller images to enlarge)

This puppet was meant to be a test, so I tried to simplify the process, using aluminum foil for the hands and to help shape the face and ears. The wool felted onto the face alright because the head is hollow (there is an aluminum wire armature underneath), but in places where the aluminum foil was especially dense, like around the ears, it was pretty tough to get the wool fibers to stay.