Character building

This is a continuation on from the concept art, I have finally started to build the models. I first started with the wire armature which is mad up of aluminium wire and simple joints. I also added miliput to build up the muscles and to prevent the armature bending in point which are not supposed to bend. I then fattened up the armatures using cotton and cling film to keep the cotton in place, this is a technique I learned from previous experimentation. I used this technique as it helps to keep the model light, whereas if I had used Plasticine straight away before fattening it up with a different material, the models would have become heavy and unsteady. Once it is fattened up I then applied plaster tape as Plasticine tends to not stick to cling film. Plaster tape is much better for Plasticine to stick to especially if it is fabric plaster tape. Then came the skinning section, in which I applied Plasticine to make the outer skin and the overall look. For Gretel and the old lady I choose to make each individual strand of hair as then I would have been able to move the hair as if the wind is blowing it. However for Hansel I chose to make shapes out of Plasticine and the add a hair like texture using very thin lines. Once I had finally applied the skin layer I needed to add clothing, there was a lot of difficulty with this as the models are quite small so I had to do very small stitching. The most difficult part of making the clothing were the tops as the models heads were far too big for the t-shirts to put over so I had to stitch them to the bodies. I liked that the heads were not in proportion to the bodies as it adding more of a cartoon-y feel to the animation. I have chosen to use very bright colour clothing as I feel that this works much better when making an animation, if they need to be dulled down it is easily achievable using after effects.

Here is what my characters have finally turned out, they first started off as wire armatures and then they were fattened up using cotton and cling film. I used plaster tape to enable the Plasticine to stick to the models. i am quite happy with how they turned out.

I also added milliput to the wire in order to prevent the characters bending in places that it shouldn't.

These are the final result of the characters.