I've been told I need a new hobby. This, to me, seems absurd when the old hobbies are all still perfectly viable.
Here is a primitive first attempt at stop motion animation.
You will note that "walking up to the camera" looks significantly less impressive than "getting up on his hind legs and roaring." I suspect that is because his small feet made incrementally moving him difficult (as soon as he was on fewer than three feet, he started slipping all over the place). Here he is with the addition of bottle cap feet. (That's right: the theorist just did an experiment. Don't worry. I won't include any error bars.)
Well... that's better.... but it's not good. The point is to be able to tell a story (involving monsters!) with this, and, at this point, I think the discontinuous nature of the motion is still too distracting to make that feasible. Suspending him from two pieces of fishing wire (as I have) may not be the best way to hold him steady against gravity between frames. I'll need to think some more about this.
Special thanks to Tim, who taught me that there is nothing you cannot do with a hot glue gun.
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Your monster needs more friction with the table.
ReplyDeleteAlso: a rigid, yet bendable (and re-bendable) wire frame underneath it all should allow you to position and stabilize without the fishing line.
One more thing: more hot glue!
Nice! I look forward to seeing where this goes. What's the head made from? Probably having the center of gravity of the model close to where the C.O.G. of the real creature would be will also aid stable positioning. I like the bottle cap hooves.
ReplyDeleteI actually think I'm going to try *more* fishing wire. At the moment, it's two threads that can be adjusted in length and position perpendicular to the direction the monster is walking. I think that if I give the threads a full two degrees of freedom (build a wire mesh above the stage and reposition the threads as the monster moves), the monster can just hang there, with all his weight on the threads, and move his legs as if he were swimming through air.
ReplyDeleteI thought about putting an extra support under him, but that introduces the difficulty of editing it out of the final video, which I'll have to do with whatever structure I end up with, but something under the monster risks legs passing behind it.
Of course, if my wire mesh ceiling doesn't work, you'll always be able to say you told me so....
Brian: the head is just a cone of florist's foam like you'd find at Joann's (they're called Michael's out here). Still, you're probably right. He is a bit front-heavy (the body is just an empty soda can). Maybe I'll throw some coins in his belly next time.
Hopefully I'll have trial the third up in a week or two.