Archive for January, 2010

I’ve been carrying on with my sculpture course.  We’ve been doing a full body sculpture with a live model over the last two weeks.  Bearing in mind that each session is about 3 hours long, that means we’ve only had about 6 hours (probably less when you count in time spent clearing up) to actually do the sculpture.  This is phenomenally quick, at least judged against my usual rate of working – I usually spend ages working on sculptures.

I’m not too happy with what I’ve come up with really, not least because it’s so rushed.  Also, the pieces we’ve created are going to be fired which means you need to prepare it for firing.  This involves scooping out the larger sections of the sculpture form underneath to make sure none of the surfaces are too thick.  You also need to prick the underside with a nail in order to release any trapped air, lest the sculpture explode in the kiln from the air expanding when heated (this I would’ve liked to see!).

Doing this basically involved turning the sculpture over in your hand and scooping out the clay on the underside.  Not only did this deform the sculpture – it’s made of wet clay with no internal armature to hold it in place – it also weakened it so when I put it back down, part of the underside collapsed inwards slightly.  It all made me think that firing sculptures was a slightly outmoded way of preserving the piece.  Maybe it works better for larger sculptures, but if I really wanted to keep my sculpture (which I didn’t really) I would’ve much preferred to make a mold which would’ve given a much better representation of the piece without the need to damage it.

Another pic of the old man mask and also a video.

Here’re some pics of my old man mask which I’ve been painting.  I’m quite pleased with the way this one has come out, looks quite realistic.  Slowly getting the hang of painting silicon!

Slowly getting close to filming my 0.LDroid.  As well as building the background character 5.L.Droid (or something) I’ve also been giving some thought to a set of sorts.  Rather than building a complete set I’m going to be filming this against a black background with some minimal set details in the background.  I can then fill in the surrounding  black edges of the image with some details, perhaps warehouse walls or similar.  It should be relatively straightforward to do this by overlaying .pngs with some transparency over the image.  I don’t want to do anything too detailed, but rather give the impression of the surrounding environment.  I want it to be quite dark and ominous.

To this end I’m going to be purchasing a black background.  You can get a 6m x 3m backdrop for about £40 off ebay.  I already have the stand so that should be more than enough.  I can trim it to size (6m x 3m is way too big).  I’m also going to be getting some gels (transparent coloured sheets to change the colour of the lights).

The horror film I did recently really showed me the value of good lighting.  I didn’t really consider the effects I did for that project my best work (I didn’t think they were bad, but they’re not amongst my favourites) however having them lit and shot by a professional crew really elevated them to look much better than they otherwise would.  Check out this still by the DOP Stephen Murphy.  Looks fantastic.

Something that also really demonstrated this to me was a video by a very nice chap I met working on the film named Dominic Hailstone.  The video’s called The Eel and is absolutely incredible, especially considering this was all done with puppets and animation with no CGI involved.  Dominic is doing a short piece for the horror film  so I’m very much looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.

All this has made me realise the problems with my previous projects; the lighting and camera work has never been very good.  In my defence, the FX are my focus and I’ve never really learnt much in the way of lighting or camera work, only what I’ve had to out of necessity, however done properly they really do add so much to a project, so I’m determined to try. I usually just stick a light on it, make sure I can see it and crack on.  Bit more thought on this aspect of the video this time round I think!

The pictures dotted about this article are my initial attempts.  They were done with a simple red cloth chucked over the spot light I was using.  I also used a blue LED torch to highlight the puppets face to make it stand out.  I’m hoping for some slightly better shots once I’ve actually got hold of some less improvised kit!

For the ’set’ I decided to incorporate the mold that I used to make the puppets into the film.  The idea is that it’s a machine that produced copies of the droid.  In a very real way, it is.

I have another motive for taking these pics; my brother (coincidentally as it happens) has almost finished writing his steampunk inspired album ‘Spinning the Compass‘.   He’s nicked a pic for the cover of the album so I figured I’d do some slightly better ones he can use (these aren’t them though, so don’t nick these just yet Tom!).  I’ll also likely be using some of his music for the vid.

I had intended to post some casting pics when I was doing the zombie mask but didn’t quite get round to it, so I thought I’d do it here.  The sculpture was done over the same head as the zombie mask:

The two halves of the mold are placed over the ‘core’.

Silicon will flow through the mold within the cavity between the core and the outer pieces of the mold.

The two halves of the mold are then bolted together and ‘bleed holes’ are drilled.  These will allow air to escape the mold as the silicon is injected so that air bubble do not form.

The molds then turned upside down and a large syringe which I made out of drain pipe is inserted into a cavity within the core.  The silicon flows into the mold through the top of the head and up through the interior.  The bleed holes are blocked off with blobs of clay as the silicon reaches them.

Once the silicon’s set the mold is cracked open.  Here’re some pics of the silicon cast fresh out of the mold and also with a coat of flesh coloured paint.  It doesn’t look quite so orange in real life, think it’s the flash that’s done that!

The painting’s not finished but I’m quite pleased with how this has turned out so far.  Painting silicon is abit of a pain and it’s only recently that I figured out how to do it – there’s very little info out there detailing this.  The only thing that sticks to silicon is silicon, nothing else will adhere, so if you use any type of regular paint it will either not dry or flake off once it has.  You therefore need to actually paint the silicon with silicon.  You can’t actually buy silicon paint (well that’s not technically true – there is one company that I know of that does it, but it’s quite expensive) so what you need to do is mix a pigment with silicon and use that as your paint.

I’ve found the best way to do this is to use silicon bathroom sealant mixed with oil paints and thinned with white spirit.  As the bathroom sealant cures it will chemically bond with the rubber making your pigment part of the piece.

This works well with the silicon I’m using as they’re both tin based silicons.  Some silicons such as Platsil, which is used extensively in the FX industry, are platinum based so I’ll need to experiment to see if this method will work with those.

Quite a few things starting or coming to fruition at the mo, first off I’ve started an evening class on sculpting the human form in clay.  While I have done this sort of thing before, most of my stuff tends to be monsters and aliens, or a sculpture that’s going to be molded in rubber,  so I seldom just do pure sculpture.

Consequently doing the human form is one of those things that I consider myself to be weakest at.  It’s actually very difficult to get it looking right.  While I understand the proportionality (generally males are 8 ‘head heights’ – their total height is 8 x the height of their head – females are more often 7 head heights for example) putting it into practice is another matter.

Most of the figures I’ve sculpted have had some form of proportionality problem and I’ve never actually had any real formal tuition in it.  We did life drawing at university which is very similar to the class I’m doing now, but it was purely drawing, no sculpture.

So anyway I spent three hours on mondy evening sculpting a naked geezer along with 15 other people!  Here’s a pic.  This  is actually the second sculpture we did in the evening and took about an hour and half.  This is pretty quick  – I usually spend weeks on sculptures!  I think they’re just trying to get us to observe the form of the model at first rather than getting into the nitty gritty of sculpture.  Apparently we’ll be doing a life sized head and a figure sculpture over the next ten weeks.

We used a slightly different method which I wasn’t used to – sculpting the figure down from a block of clay.  I usually build a metal armature and slowly build up the figure, I guess there wasn’t time to do that in the class though.

This is a slight departure for me in that I usually only write about my own projects, and this isn’t exactly a review, but I went to see Avatar for a second time yesterday (courtesy of the lovely people at Dolby) and a few thoughts occurred so I may as well write them down here, this is a blog after all and it was James Cameron (and more specifically Stan Winston) who got me interested in the whole field of special effects in the first place.

Specifically it was the Terminator which I saw when I was ten at a friends birthday party that did it (yes I know it was an 18 at the time ! ;0). We also saw Creep Show II which gave me nightmares, but I was absolutely fascinated by the scene in the Terminator where he repairs himself. I couldn’t believe someone had actually built, not only the robot, but also a replica Arnie too.

I enjoyed Avatar perhaps even more than I did the first time around and having read a few reviews I wanted to comment on the criticisms of the plot.  Mostly to say that I agree – the plot is Dances with Wolves in Space, or Pocahontas (Smurfahontas) etc etc, but (for me at least, and I think for many people) that doesn’t matter.

Later Cameron and Winston productions (T2 and Aliens) cemented my interest in SFX along with Predator (also a Stan Winston film) and Alien, Robocop, even Alien 3.

Now what do all these have in common?  Namely that it’s the production design and special effects that make or break them.  Now you could argue that they have to – ‘these worlds don’t exist, you have to create them’. A case in point is Predator.  The production actually stopped filming once the initial alien design failed and they were left with what was basically a fairly standard eighties action film set in a jungle.  Then Stan Winston got involved (interestingly it was apparently James Cameron who suggested that the creature should be given mandibles) and transformed the film into a cult sci-fi classic.  The quality of the special effects lifted an otherwise humdrum film to be much more than it otherwise could have been.

Similarly with Alien – would we have heard of that film if it hadn’t had HR Geigers staggeringly, well alien designs?  Ridley Scott’s sets helped of course ;0)  But my point is if it hadn’t had those two things it would probably live in the bargain bin priced at £2 and still be called Star Beast.

Describing Avatar – it’s about these twelve foot tall blue elves who live in a giant tree right…? – sounds ridiculous but it’s a testament to the quality of the FX that the incredible is portrayed so credibly.  The CGI is actually astonishing, for the most part completely photoreal – it really does look like they went and filmed in actual jungle locations.  If you haven’t seen it yet I really do recommend you make an effort to catch in the cinema, it simply won’t be quite the same on DVD or Blu-ray.

There’re alot of bad special effects out there (you only need to scroll down this blog to see some examples ;0) but when they’re done well they make a film much more than it otherwise could be.   There’s no substitute for the story of course, but I say they can turn an otherwise familiar narrative into much more.

So it is with Avatar, yes the plot’s familiar, yes you’ll instantly recognise the walking robot suits, drop ships and space marine stereotypes of Aliens (so much so that my brother swears it’s set in the same universe), but the production design, the special effects and the world are realised in such a believable way that you can happily lose yourself in the world of Pandora for 2 hours 40 minutes and even take comfort in the fact that the plot delivers everything you expect it to.  And that’s the power of good special effects.

Finally coming back to my Oldroid (or 0.L.Droid).  The effects for the horror film and masks I’ve been working on got in the way, but I’ve now got the time to turn my attention back to it.

Here’s the test vid I did a while ago as a reminder http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GSZm5jDJ94

I’ve done a little work on the 0.L.Droid puppet itself, mostly the eyes which are now more or less working, however I’ve mostly been concentrating on a new background character which is a more primitive version of the 0.L.Droid, maybe 5.L.Droid or something ;0)

The model’s made from a silicon cast of the face of the original puppet plus various bits and pieces such as bits from old action figures, batteries, bits of wood etc etc.  It has some degree of motion – the head moves left to right and up and down and the arm also moves.  I’ll be adding a hand too.  I think I’ll animate it to put on a top hat or something ;0)

I’m working on the hands that go with the old man mask sculpture at the minute.  I’ve made a fibreglass mold of the head now and I’m just cleaning that out ready to inject the silicon. I’ll try and post some more complete pics of the process than I managed when I was doing the zombie mask. Once the cast is ready I’ll be painting it and punching in some hair round the back of the head and some eyebrows.

For the hands I’m sculpting them in chavant over life casts of my own hands.  This is to ensure they’ll be large enough to be worn as gloves.

First off I made an alginate mold of my hand and forearm.  Alginate is a life casting material that’s made from seaweed.  It’s commonly used by dentists to take casts of teeth.  It sets to a spongy consistency which is ideal for taking casts of the body.

It’s a little difficult to take a pic when your arms’ encased, but here’s a pic once I’d got my arm out. The mold was then filled with plaster.

As the casts were going to be used as part of a mold once I’d done the sculpture (they’ll sit in the middle of the mold in order to create a cavity) I reinforced them with some wire inside the plaster and by adding a layer of fibre glass on the outside.  Here’re some pics.