So I am now elbow deep into the Aardman masterclass. I am enjoying myself a ton. It is rough, but I am learning a lot. The whole point is to stretch myself and learn how to be a better animator. That is not comfortable. Growth is rarely comfortable. :) I am still figuring out how to fit in full time work, taking care of a sick doggo, personal stuff and the class. Because I live in a townhouse with no yard and only a small portable washing machine, this has been hard. Cleaning takes forever. Trying to get doggo to where he can go outside when he is having a digestive emergency is hard. It frequently has resulted in the need for deep cleaning. Unfortunately. I am guilty of tossing an area rug instead of trying to clean it. Just cause I was already taking hours to wash bedding (mine) multiple times, clothes, towels, etc. At least I have the portable washer, and don't have to haul it all to a laundromat. I love my doggo. Really I do. This just emphasizes how much I need to find a house with a yard. If there was a yard I could just open the back door for him to run through, instead of trying to attach a leash to an already distressed doggo in time to open the front door and get to the pet area. Add to that servers going down at work necessitating long working hours, and there is not a ton of time, energy or brainpower left to apply to class. I am hoping I can regroup and get on top of everything this week. Doggo seems to have calmed a bit. Servers are running. I still haven't caught up on sleep, but things are loosening up a bit so I can figure out a schedule that will allow me to do everything I need and want to do.

Anyway...

As I don't really have much right now, and I do want to try to be better at keeping up this blog, I thought I would do a deeper dive into my experiments with Cosclay.



Cosclay is a rubberized polymer clay, similar to Sculpy. The biggest difference being that after it has been baked, it is pliable though no longer sculptable.



I first heard about it when the YouTuber Ace of Clay used it on one of his sculptures. He uses it when he has a lot of thin bits that stick out and are in danger of breaking if he uses the regular Sculpy. He demonstrated how much the pieces can bend after baking. He also was successful painting it after baking it.

So it got me thinking...I wonder how hard it would be to use in animation puppets. I did some googling, and really no one has any opinions on it. No one really had a searchable post on them testing it for this purpose. Someone asked in a stop motion forum about it, and was shot down by a lot of people who haven't tried it. that just seemed...inaccurate at best.

But Cosclay, though worth the expense if it works, is kind of spendy to just buy as an experiment. I was waffling about whether or not I should try it...whether it was worth it to me to have clay I may not be able to use.

Then another YouTuber tried it for sculpting. And he loved it. And when he decided to do a set of art boxes, he decided to include a small batch of it in the sculpture box. There were other things included in the sculpture box I wanted, so I decided to get that and if the Cosclay worked I would buy more to use for animation puppets.

This was just a rought hand, to see how well it animated. It is not in proportion to anything. I used 18 gague aluminum wire to rough out fingers and palm, then sculpted the clay over it. Not too difficult. Then I played with animating it. It was really not bad for animating. Here is my test sequence...

So then THAT got me thinking. Can I make a character puppet completely out of Cosclay? I was and am pretty sure a full 12 inch puppet would not work very well. Not a whole Wallace from Wallace and Grommet...though maybe, if the clay is layered on thin. So I decided to start with something simple...an earthworm.

The first iteration turned out being way too thick. While it is bendable, it does not easily stay where I put it. I just bent an 18 gage wire in half, twisted it with my hand crank drill and covered it with cosclay. This one also baked just fine in the toaster oven. Also took paint really well.

So back to the drawingboard. I redesigned the worm to be thinner and longer. And a little bit more realistic, though still cartoonish. The thinner worm worked great! Fully articulated. Stays in the pose I place it in. I even textured it a bit by putting a thread on my handy helper and rolling the worm over it down the length of the worm. That worked way better than I expected as well.

So...conclusion? I LOVE LOVE LOVE this stuff! In my opinion it works great for stop motion animation puppets, with the caveate that you need to be choosy about where you use it and how thick you build up the clay.

Also...I am currently making replacement hands out of Cosclay for my Wade puppet. My plan is to play around with him and see how well it goes. Have several more twisted wire humanoid puppets in process, and if I can figure out how to make it work well with Wade I will use the same technique with them.

So I needed to test out my theory on how to make my puppets work for my next video. So I built a head, mouths and eyes. The point is that the face can be more expressive, even if I am not syncing to dialog.

I started with an alluminum foil ball as a base.

For some reason I didn't get any pics of the next few steps, but I did Periscope it if you wanna go to my channel at teaweaselstopmo and watch me build it. I put an outer layer of clay on, then I marked where I wanted the eyes and mouth to be. Then I built it up a bit around those areas then sculpted the face. I think it looks a little bit like Armin Shimerman, the guy who played Quark on Deep Space Nine. Symmetry is not my strong suit. The ears ended up unbalanced. And I made the chin way too long. I needed to move the mouth down a bit, further away from the nose. Otherwise not bad for a first try. As I used SuperSculpey, the next thing I did was bake in the toaster oven. It is brand new for this purpose, so I burnt his head a bit on the top.

Next I made the different mouths. This was the difficult part. I just didn't feel that sausage mouths were the right style, but how to make them without the heavy lips? Well, I tried...

So then I wanted to test it out, see if it worked. I did 3 tests, then I painted it and did one more. Here are the videos:

Then I did some painting. Yeah, it is a bit creepy. Needs some eyelids. And hair or a hat. And eyebrows.

So overall I think this will work, I just need to practice it so I get better at it. Just for shits and giggles, here is the test video I did in color. I didn't bother with sound though.

See? Creepy without eyelids, huh. Well, when I get further along I will share more of my epic fails. :)

So now I am working on playing around with what I got. I tried making a proof of concept for the mouth idea I had. The clay I used was way too heavy, and didn't work very well. So I ordered some Supersculpey. It came in last night, so I decided to play a little bit with it. I made a short video with my phone in the Animate It! app. I didn't really care for how poorly it was centered, so I decided to use this opportunity to figure out how to fix it in Pinnacle. I did one just without doing anything but adding credit cards. Then I did one with just a static zoom. Then I did one with a animated pan and zoom. I think it is ok. I still contend it is better to do it right in camera, but it is fun to learn how to do things in post.

So here is the original unedited one:

Was kind of fun. I shot about 2 seconds worth and manipulated the length in the app.

Here is the one I did with the static zoom:

A tad flaily, but otherwise not bad. It did not get as mushy as I expected it to.

Here is the one with the animated pan and zoom:

It didn't hit exactly the points I wanted it to, but I am putting that up tp my inexperience. I added a couple of keyframes and it did basically what I wanted it to.

Always fun to learn new things.

So my lighting setup finally got here. It didn't contain everything I thought it did, but enough that I don't care. The umbrellas are very fragile. I accidentally sat on one of the black/reflective ones and the post broke clean through. I don't know how I will fix it yet.

Of course I had to play with it a bit. I set up the background frame, clamped a bedsheet to  it, tacked a black foamboard to the table, set up the lights and played. Here are pics of the rig/ setup.

Here is the resulting video. It isn't great, but not too bad. I don't like the color of the bulbs that came with this setup. Too blue. I want something warmer.

I shot this video on my Android phone using the Animate It! app from Aardman. I love this app. I like Osnap for my ipad, but for my phone this is the best one out there for free. You can pay for $5 add-ons. But it allows you to lock focus, white balance, and exposure. It also includes onion skinning in the standard app. And if you pay for the add-on package you can shoot in 4k. My phone acts weird when I check 4k option, though. It will take one picture normal, next way too overexposed. Even if I have exposure lock on. May be I need to do something I am not aware of yet. I will play with it more later.

So working with Pinnacle again, there are several things missing in the software. Like titles. I can no longer make title cards. But you know what? I have my micro managing of the timeline back, so I am OK with that. I can make those in GIMP and import them. Not a problem.

Today I am waiting on several things to come together. I am waiting for my community collgee to actually release my transcript so I can start school. The plan right now is to go to SNHU and get my Bachelor degree in Software Developement. Symantec is a certified TAA employer, which means as a laid off employee I am entitled to "retraining benefits". Which means schooling paid for....books and everything...and no loans needed. If they will take at least 24 credits from Lane I qualify. I have been accepted by admissions, I am just waiting for the transcript part. TAA will approve funding if the program can be completed in 130 educational weeks and come in under $35,000. Most schools are so expensive. One I was looking at requires 184 credits for the degree, and is $325/credit. That makes it around $59,000 for everything. Even with transfer credits, there is no way that would get approved. There are only 4 schools that I was able to figure out a way to make it work. I missed out on 3 of them waiting for Lane. But if SNHU will take at least 24 transfer credits, than that would put me under the 130 educational weeks and right around the $35,000. Waiting is SO FRICKEN HARD.

I also have been trying to get employed again. Being in Portland helps...a lot. I have gotten calls from employers I re-applied to after moving here. I have had 2 interviews with DreamHost. They were excited when I told them about going back to school and my plans for that. Waiting for this process to be over is hard. I just want them to employ me and get going already. I know, I gotta give em time to like me. But still....

Sitting on my ass waiting never suited me very well. So I spent the morning playing around with stop mo. I still can't get Dragonframe to work. This frustrates me. I spent $200 (normally it is $300 full price) and I can't even use it. Pinnacle I spent $60 and for the most part works fine. I have my micro managing back for the timeline. Fun. I just shot and edited a little thingy. I didn't bother with working with the lighting much. But I did practice editing sound effects, music and voice in. Here it tis, if you feel like gandering...

It seems the struggle with stop motion animation software is a continual one. I finally got Pinnacle to work the way I need it to, then they did some upgrades and removed the functionality I needed. I need/want to be able to micro manage the timeline. Used to be able to that. Now I can't get it to let me.

Dragonframe still doesn't work. Got a hold of support, who told me to roll back a version. That works...sort of. I cannot get my camera to capture with it. I got the Canon T5i because it is specifically listed as a compatible camera in Dragonframe documentation. While I can take pictures with it in Pinnacle still, and I can use it with the Canon live capture software, when I try to use Dragonframe I get a message that it failed to capture. I cannot get a live view. And even though the camera is set to manual and I have it plugged into the outlet, I keep getting warnings from Dragonframe that neither are true. This is getting old. I can use the crappy webcam with Dragonframe. Not what I want to use. No control, and I can't place it whereever I want to. And it is CRAPPY. No quality at all. So something is happening during communication between the Canon and Dragonframe. There is a setting I am not finding in the documentation. There may be a patch that I can't get because they would rather I move up to the newest version, which doesn't work with my computer.

Grr argh sigh.

*EDIT: Ok, so I just let Pinnacle update AGAIN. Micro managing ability is BACK! Whew. No matter what I do I can't get Dragonframe to connect correctly with my camera. I found an additional document. Still didn't help. Stop Motion centric software MY ASS.

Played more with the Capaldi action figure. He is kind of fun to play with, even if he looks like a cross between Capaldi and Neil Gaiman. I still don't have anchor magnets, so I decided to see about how I would move him with a closer shot. I used my telephoto lens enxtension and the keys from the octopus video. It was kind of fun. It is a bit jerky. Ok, a lot jerky. In fact, YouTube offered to de-shake it for me. How sweet. :P

I also obtained a way to get tips/contributions electronically. I don't honestly expect to get anything, but it is free, and any chance to get funds to upgrade equipment or pay for building materials I will take. I added a button in the right hand column for your convenience. I want to build my next set of puppets with a skin of baloon rubber latex. I think that will work better thant he stuff I used for Wade. I only did Wade's hands in latex, and it wasn't exactly what I expected. I think the ballon rubber will be more durable and stretchy, making it easier to move the hands and fingers without causeing issues.

Anyway, here is the keys video I made.

I also did one where I joined the clip form the other day with this clip. Here is the results for that:

Yup....I am still working at perfecting my camera technique with Pinnacle 20. It has been frustrating, but I think I finally got it working how I want it to. I did some more animating today, and plan to do more tomorrow. Practice makes perfect. I want to be able to make good, entertaining videos, I have to practice. Right?

So here is the most recent attempt. I called it Rec Room Riot. I do not know why. I did not realize that there could bhe an issue with light refracting wierd through the glass snail. But the focus is pretty good. I am happy with that. I notice the little things, of course...the visible handi tac....the bumped table....the choppy sequence....but overall not to shabby. I may get the hang of this after all. :)

*Edit: So I decided to upload it to Vimeo as well, just to see if it looks better. It does. Much. Here ya go.