Asteroids

I've been having a great time interning for Justin and Shel Rasch for their next film this summer. I made these asteroids and modified a huge one to explode. Their work is amazing and making asteroids is fun. That's about that.

Headphones Build

I made this out of sculpy and matte board, but I am NOT liking how it is looking after painting. I think I'm going to try a second version with foam and matte board.

Set Build

I've started building my set. For vines I wrapped wire mesh in foam, coated with latex and painted with tempera. For leaves I cut up some green foam I got from the scrap bin at Foam Mart, and some Wonder Foam from Dick Blick. For the large trees I sanded down balsa foam, primed, and painted with tempera. So basically it is a world of foam... sweet sweet foam.

Armature Rebuilds

I scaled down one of the puppets and completely rebuilt another one. These guys should be much lighter, smaller and easier to animate. I also made the hands a lot simpler, with a wire bend over itself for each finger. I put square stock on the hands and wrists so they could be replaced in case any fingers brake.

Set 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.

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: