'Little Unkle' - stop motion character creation

I used the term 'cool' in the first title of this series of posts about my film- studio job because it was the most common reaction people got when I told them what I did. There are a lot of jobs out there that, on the surface, may seem like a dream job or a dream come true. But let's face it, life doesn't look like that at all. Probably never. I know that people tend to exaggerate and use clichés like 'living my dream', 'that's all I ever wanted' and so on...

But! everyday life is made up of small fortunes, small successes, unfortunate mistakes and colossal disasters - at least that's how it always looks to me :) How about you, guys?

Today I would like to introduce you to the process of working on a puppet, one of the characters from the film. 'Maly Wujcio('Little Unkle') is just an uncle for the main characters of "Trefliki", but as a character he has a lot more to offer - he is a magical individual, he takes Trefliks kids on journeys – usually it would be moral tale), he can fly and he often uses his magic to help out others.

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The plan for the character was to create something between a human and a gnome. Now, after years I think, that Dany DeVito would be a perfect model for this character:)

So one by one:

Most of the characters were the result of brainstorming, but the general outline and idea for the character belonged to our director - Marek Skrobecki. Working with him was a great pleasure and, without hiding it - an adventure. Marek, in addition to great knowledge and experience, is not only a nice person, but also a guy who has an unusual distance to himself and the world. He often made fun of us and himself. He would hide behind parts of the set and scare us, sing, shout in our ears when we were working in concentration and the tools fell out of our hands. He was an absolutely charming personality.

One anecdote has particularly stuck in my mind.
At the very beginning of the establishment of KAZstudio (when I worked there it was Stop-Motion Picture Studio - Trefl), it was located on the first floor of an old naval school building. On the ground floor there was a huge charity shop. Actually, you could call it a "curiosity cabin", because you could find there all sorts of things - from vinyl records, through antique music stands, candlesticks, books, textiles, furniture, dishes, toys. We often spent afternoons and breaks there with my co-workers. We took a liking to the ladies who ran the shop and often brought things to sell for them. As it turned out, we weren't the only ones who were fans of the shop - and we found this out in a very spectacular way.

We were sitting on the sofa in the corridor during the break, eating sandwiches and talking nonsense, and Marek, as if nothing had happened, marched out of his office dressed as a... a ladybird.

He wore an insect headband, and a red cloak with black dots. I was thankful that I did not have food in my mouth at that moment, because it would have landed on my conversation-partner. The director with a stone face threw: "what's up Dears?" and simply disappeared in the doorway to the Puppet Department.

We laughed for a good few minutes. I still don't know if he bought the outfit to make the others feel better or if he just knew he looked good in red:)

So we had a lot of fun at work from time to time, but usually the days were quite monotonous, because although the work itself was creative - it required close to insane attention to detail. The smallest imperfection would come out later in the shots, so you had to be extremely attentive and constantly focused. Not to mention the endless amendments and changes. Working with professionals like Sylwia(my red-headed boss-lady) or Marek requires you to keep your cool. Because changes will happen, and often. Sometimes entire character concepts went to waste, when they were actually ready to be scanned and thrown onto a 3D printer. Yeah, happened few times.

To shed some light for you on just how tedious and long the process of making stop-motion animation puppets is, today I will show you the process of making 'Tiny Unkle' s head.

STARTING THE PROCES – SCULPTING

With such small forms as animation dolls, plasticine is a very good starting point. The Uncle's face was not very complicated to carve and the concept for his character was fortunately quite clear from the start and didn't change too much along the way. I worked on the mould with plasticine diligently for 2 days to make it very smooth. At the beginning I worked on a head without ears - because the ears were supposed to be possible to animate, but the concept changed during the process, and after do this small change - the uncle's head with ears was ready to be cast in resin.

RESIN PART

Even if the surface of the plasticine seems perfectly smooth to us, a casting in resin will prove that this is not the case. The resin mould is then covered with a spray or liquid "putty" using an airbrush in order to fill out the irregularities. The surface is then sanded until everything is perfect. And it doesn't stop there - an 'end putty' is used to give a 'controlled texture' - which will diffuse the light nicely and not concentrate in one place - which looks bad under the camera's eye.

3D SCANNING

When the uncle's head was ready - it was scanned from all sides to create a faithful 3D model. Then the head was printed in a 3D printer (we had a so-called powder printer, the powder was cellulose-based) and then fixed with liquid cyano-acrylate glue (the same composition can be found in Super-Glue). In the meantime, I worked on my uncle's facial expressions(mounths only) which were later also scanned. The Pupet department members only did the main face, such as the mouth folded into a round 'o' or a wide grin with teeth - all the intermediate faces were created in a 3D programme on the computer by our designers. The characters had between 40 to an over 100 interchangeable animation faces. The faces were swapped between shots, and were held on tiny magnets.

WHAT'S NEXT?

When the faces were printed, nicely finished and magnetised, they were taken over by those responsible for painting. At this time I worked on my uncle's moustache and hair. They were made of dyed felt fixed with glue, so that they would not move or deform between shots. So I already have a face with interchangeable faces, previously prepared eyes and hair. All we need are eyelids and eyebrows. The eyebrows were made of latex so that they could be animated and easily moved. This is a material that can not only be dyed in any colour, but also easily 'sticks' to anything, unlike silicone. The eyelids were made of thin plastic and made only by Sylva. She never showed any of us how she made them.

She had quite a few secrets there....

I hope you guys have lovely Tusday!
Yours,
Strega Azure

And on the set doll looked like this:

The finished doll looked like this

Pictures are my authorship if not stated otherwise,
all rights reserved @strega.azure©

For those among you, that are interesting in Marek's Skrobecki creations, here you have little taste:

D.I.M.