How I made Trinket
Some people have been asking me how I made 'Trinket' so I added this lovely little part
to our webpage. Trinket is a short stop-motion film, more specifically a claymation film. I am not
going to explain the whole stop-motion proses, two good site to get info on stop-motion
are Animate Clay and
Brick Films.
Puppits
The first thing I started with was the puppets. The puppets I used for Trinket were about
third generation puppets for me. It took a bit of experimenting to get puppets that could
be animated well during the two months of filming that Trinket took.
One the the first things I did on the puppets was to buy clay. When you make a claymation
film you can't just go get a tub of Playdough, you need high quality clay. In the US Van
Aken is the standard and that was what I used. Van Aken is, "a pigmented oil base
modeling compound renowned for its smooth consistency and brilliant color range. It is
self adhering, non-toxic, never hardens, permanently pliable." ...yada, yada ya...
I got mine at Mister Art because no
local craft shops stocked it. It is about $2.66 a pound and only available in North
America. (in other countries they use NewPlast or something) Van Aken clay looks like this:
The first thing I made on the puppets were the faces. The eyes are not glass or anything
like that, glass get foggy over time because it is a liquid and absorbs the color of the
clay around it,they are these berring things Marc Spess sells at the
Animate Clay 'How to Store'.
In order to animate them I heated a pen with a lighter and melted a whole in them, then I
colored a black pupil with a Sharpie. You can paint the eyes if you want more then just
a black pupil, but as this was my first claymation I was trying to keep it simple. So that
the clay would not stick the eyes I lubricated the sockets with Vaseline. The eyes look like
this:
The frame was made with aluminum wire twisted together using a clamp and drill driver.
While copper wire could work it is very stiff and you could damage your puppet
while you animated it, steel wire is bad because it has memory and will spring
back to its old position. I also got the wire at the 'How to Store' @
Animate Clay. I then used some
size diagrams my brother made me so the proportions would be right on the puppets (my
legs are a bit shorter then they should be for a person of my height and it has a way of
showing up in stuff I make) I fastened the arms legs and torso together using epoxy, I
also created bones so that the puppets could only bend in the right spots. I originally
had fastened the armature together using hot glue with dowels as bones but that was awful.
The wire looks like this:
I then made these little wooden 'clogs', I called them. The had a very small hole in the
back which I stuck the aluminum legs in and super glued them in. I had a larger hole
in the front which was used for the tiedown system. Normally when animators have a tiedown
system it is pretty fancy, using nuts in the feet which you screw bolts with wing nuts
though the set floor, however my tiedown system was a friction based system using quarter
inch dowels that went into a duel layer pegboard about half an inch apart (so the dowels
would not wiggle) and then went into the holes in the clogs on the feet.
I then put clay on top of the armatures and that was that. The tiedown system with the
aluminum wire armature was strong enough for 9.5 inch puppets to stand on one foot for
quite some time.
Set
This was the set for Trinket. It was on a workbench hight table so I could do all my
animation standing up. The workbench was made of some old hollow core doors. For shots
where the cameras needed to be placed adjacent the door and window I had a piece of board
that I would screw onto the table, I had to do this because the camera I was using was
a web camera. In future films I will be using a digital SLR and a tripod, so the add-on
will be unnecessary.
The base of the set was made with two 2x4 feet sheets of pegboard, I got it at a local
hardware store. I separated the two sheets with half inch pieces of wood as you can see
pictured above. This was for the tie down system I talked about in the latter part of the
puppet section.
All of the shelving was made with some thin sheets of wood, while the counter and the
table with toys on it were made with laminated board.
I made a window and a Plexiglas door in the shop to make it seem like there was a
living world outside. I used grey paper to cover the pegboard to make an illusion
of a sidewalk or something.
Of course if I have window and glass door I need to put something behind it. So I made a
shop across the street. For how unclear the shop can be seen through the window I put
way to much work into it. It was made half the scale of the puppets.
I used double corrugated cardboard and covered it with a mixture of Elmer's glue and
Fix-it-All which is some kind of dry wall filler or something, you can get it at a
local hardware store. I applied it with a brush to give it a stucco texture, which never
shows up in the movie, the rain shield is made of real cloth using aluminum wire as the
frame.
The walls of the shop are not permanent, I cut them to size and then hot glued dowels
on the back of them so they could stick into the pegboard, and be removable if I needed
to shoot through that wall. On the tops of the wall I used tacks to make the tops of the
walls would touch in the corers.
Everything in the shop that was painted was painted with a flat white paint, while inside
walls are normally painted with a semi-gloss, I went with flat because the slightest gloss
will glow vibrantly in the camera due to lighting and whatever goes on inside cameras. The
only flat paint I found was intended for outdoor use (20 year warranty) and cost a bit more
then indoor paints. Sometimes you can notice the clerks shirt glowing in Trinket, if I
were you I would dull white clay so that it will not do this as badly.
All the toys were borrowed from friends or purchased off Ebay. As I did not have enough
toys to fill the whole shop I made little paper boxes. I used some pattern I leaned in a
high school art class and it may have been more trouble then it was worth.
Now I did alot of animation around the counter so I needed it to not bounce around during
animation. I glued it to two the the floor boards that it was on. In one shot, I was
removing the table every frame so I could get at the clerk and putting in back down in it's
holes and you could not even see it jigle.
Lighting
Trinket was lit with five lamps. In order to get full control over the lighting I put
paper over top the window that was in the room and then hung towels over that. That way
the rising and setting of the sun would not change the sets lighting, I also did not use
the rooms lights as they are very difficult to change if need be.
I used the three arm lamps I had to light the inside of the shop, I had two 60 watt GE
Reveal bulbs for fill lighting and one 15 watt spot bulb to light the puppets.
Having made a shop with two windows I needed to light the outdoors and the opposing shop.
Fortunately I had an overcast outdoors that did not need tons of lighting, I found the best
way to light was to have a low wattage bulb reflecting on the shop on the other side of the
street. I used some sort vanity bulb and reflected it using aluminum foil.
If the interior of the shop at the other side of the street was not lit, it would be hard
to tell that there was a shop there at all, and people who had noticed would wonder why it
was not open. So I used a 10 watt bulb inside it standing on a clear lid from the top of
a pack of blank CDs.
Audio
When you make a claymation you do not animate and then add voice, you get the audio track
you want and then animate the shots. So as you can imagine Robert had to write the
scrip, I then storyboarded the whole script before I had Greg and Emily do any acting.
This helped me while they recorded to better understand when they need to pause for select
actions I would have to animate. I recorded at Ben's house using his sound board (it is worth
more then my computer) and his mics. We used a high quality 1/4 inch double male cord to
output what was going into his sound board out to my computer. I used the Live Drive on my
Creative Labs 5.1 Pro sound card to do this, the result, crystal clear audio (not so clear
on the 6.7 MB version of Trinket).
Animation
I used Magpie to
figure out what shaps the mouth had to be in at what frame and Anasazi Stop Motion Animator
to capture the frames with my Quick Cam Pro Zoom.