Set Design

Max's Design

Armatures

I built up the armatures for both characters this weekend. I'm experimenting with the hands, added some epoxy to the knuckle areas to try to give it more of a dimensional feel and less of the wire dipped in latex look... we'll see how it goes. I tested out one of the armatures walking... it's a little big, but so far so good.

The Animatic

Not quite finished yet. The musical freak-put part needs to be more nailed down and the ending is still a bit weird. But this is pretty close the the story of Moe:

Moe the Mockup

This is Moe 1.0. I started building him in a workshop last October. I worked on it throughout the semester, eventually adding foam and latex build-up and finished with a coat of blue acrylic paint. The head and replacement mouths are made from super sculpy. The eyes are these rad little magnets that I found at Dick Blick in Hollywood.
There are a few things wrong with this puppet that I will keep in mind when building Moe 2.0.
• Head is too heavy, making it hard to stand him completely strait a lot of times.
• Legs are two short, making walking very awkward.
• Body doesn't allow for bending.
• Hands are pretty small, might be weird on closeups.

For all his flaws, I did manage to get a few moves out of him though:

Inspirational Imagery

I knew from the beginning that I wanted this to be a stop motion piece, with a musical freakout part hand drawn in Flash.

Some of my stop motion heroes include Adam Elliot and the Aardman crew. Their work with eyes and facial expressions are what I am thinking of when I am thinking of Moe.

I think Pink Elephants on parade is one of the most amazing sequences from any Disney movie. The transitions and atmosphere are something I aspired to achieve a small fraction of. I want the musical part to be a combination of this, the shapes of Chihuly, and many other things




I'm archiving a full repository of inspirational images over here: http://louisjmorton.tumblr.com/

Initial Ideas

I originally had this idea of two monkeys that lived on an island, Fred and Fritz. One day a fruit drops out of the sky. Fred bites the fruit and it transports both monkeys to a new environment. This makes Fred very happy because he always had wanted to travel. But it makes Fritz very freaked out. Fritz grabs the fruit from Fred, bites it, and they are transported back to their home. They both realize that the fruit will take them wherever they want to go when they bite it. They go back and forth arguing, biting the fruit while the background changes from exotic local back to their peaceful jungle home. Eventually the fruit gets down to one last bite. Fred is about to bite it to send them to a faraway land when he notices how upset Fritz is. He bites it and they end up back home. At the end it is revealed that the island is now on the back of a giant flying creature, so both monkeys got their way.
Anyway, I decided this story was wayyyy to complicated for a one semester project. I had another idea where this little guy walks around listening to music and the background changes with the song. No story at all, just an idea.
I'm not sure when, but these two ideas globbed together and formed the story of Moe, an easily excitable monkey who hears music for the first time.

Stop Motion Exercises