Animated Documentary - plasticine tests

Now we had a storyboard and charcter designs, our next step was to experiment with plasticine to figure out how where going to turn Ciara's drawings into 3d characters. This is something I really enjoy doing so was really excited to start.

We first of all picked a character (the sheep) and decided to both individually create this character based on the design.

We both went for a similar approach to creating white balls and building it up to make the body, however with mine, I began to merge mine together and then used my jumper to add more of a wooly texture.

We put them beside eachother and picked out what we thought would work to finalise a design. I liked how bulky Ciara had made the eyes on her sheep, I thought they stood out more and that it really worked with the character, I also like the squareness of her sheeps face, as I had done mine more pointed, but I think the body of my sheep works better, as it's bigger and the design doesn't topple over as it also had 4 sturdy legs. 

 

 Annabeth suggessted adding a next, so it's not all squished together and so you can move it's head around if needed. 

I think the sheep now looked better, and if we do need to move its head around, we can.

These are the 3 sheep we made that session, the last sheep is a combonation of all the things we thought worked from the other two sheep, I do however think the boddy needs to be slightly bigger, and we need to work on the texture as it may be a little too fine. 

Mike then suggested to buy some eye beads for the characters, then we can easily move them around with a pin, and that using vasiline will hold them to the modle, but allowes you to move them around.  

He also said to do some camera tests to make sure you can capture the detail, if it doesn't pick up exaggerate it more. 

We also need to think about scale, as there are quite tiny. 

I think our next job will be to create some mouth so we know what size we need to work at and what mouth look best with the characters.

 While Ciara was creating the 3rd sheep, I begain creating another character, the newt.  I worked from the design, the design was two colours, grey with green underneith, but I though with him being on his bell, the green wouldn't be shown, so I made him in the closest plasticine colour to the design. when I had finished, I thought he looked a bit boring so I looked up on Google images for some inspiration of different newts.


I found this image and loved the spots on his back, and wanted to create a similar pattern on my character. 

I mixed the grey I used witch some white to make it lighter, the rolled out a thin black strip to go round it. 

I still need to consider where his mouth will go and if I'll need to change anything when we get to this point.

I also thought about how the farmer would come to be. I thought long about how I'd do his beard, i began by sticking on rolled out plasticine, but this really didn't look right, so I begain creating texture with my scalple and I really loved how it looked. i had to be so careful went handling as I didn't want to squash the texture, and that make me think if it was too much, but I've recieve nothing but good comments on it, so I think the texture will stay.

Again I need to consider his mouth, and how he will speak. I did think out the short film La Luna from Pixar, because when the dad and grandfather speak in this, only there mustaches move, and I quite liked the idea of this, as I think a bulky mouth might ruin his look.

Lots of experimenting is needed.