Making another bird

Hello and welcome to my blog.

I am aiming to keep using this blog from now on as a central place to generally update what I am working on... If you are interested to see what I have done before, have a look at my portfolio website: stopmoroos.wix.com/roos-mattaar

These first months this blog will be mainly showing my work on a project for the 'exploring and developing practice in animation' module of my course at the Bristol school of animation. More then a usual blog with regular random posts I am trying to keep it a bit organised in terms of what I've been working on. I am starting with a couple of posts about what have been my progressions the last weeks, as I did not get it all organized before.

(27-01-2013) At the moment I have just started working on a stop motion bird character. I am still developing his exact look and design, so I can move on to the technical details, and use this as a project to learn about ball and socket armature making and other moving mechanisms. The first aim will be to complete the functioning armature that can perform all actions I want it to perform. Then if time allows I can move on to 'skinning' the armature, which will probably involve some mouldmaking and casting, but also an approach for the feathers. I will have to make decisions about this in the armature stage already though, to not get to unpleasant surprises when the armature is finished. Therefore these first posts may be a mixture of character designs and descriptions, material tests, technical sketches and prototypes, then going back to look and design again and ideas for approaching the finishing look.

'Another' bird? Yes, I have just completed working on a group project, making a 90 second comedy stop motion animation, called 'fowl play'. The film features two birds in a nest, fighting about a fly, but really loosing interest in the fly when getting into a fight with each other. Everything about this project can be found on this website: http://fowlplayfilm.weebly.com/index.html The finished models also can be found on my website.
I was the main puppet fabricator on this project, and came up with the technical design and built the puppets from start to finish. These birds had wire armatures, and the birds were cartoon style characters.
The bird I will be making now will be a more 'anatomically correct' character, with a more naturalistic approach. Although I want to go for a slightly stylized approach, the bird should be able to fit in a more 'real' environment. I don't want to re-create an existing bird, but want to pick certain features I like and combine them to make an expressive character. I am still slightly doubting about the exact look, but know that I will take my main inspiration from vultures...

That's all for now. More to come, with certainly more pictures, moodboards, sketches, sculptures, designs, ideas, rejected ideas, new options, etcetera. Hooray! Making things!