* * * final major project film finished * * *

here is my final edit of my film. it took a lot of effort but here it is. yes the camera for some reason is abit jumpy but i am still happy with how my puppet moves through out my short. i hope you all enjoy my film.

unfortunately i am unable to post the video directly on here so heres the youtube link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3VIUsAKqdc&feature=youtu.be

robot sound track

i was unhappy with my other soundtrack. i felt that the music was too dark for the story and didn't fit the film. me and my friend who studies music tech worked together on making a new sound track. i played him my old sound track so that he could get an idea of what i was looking for. he came up with this. 

  

robot at work. on set

just wanted to share a few photos of my robot during filming and what my work area looked like. 

book prop

in my animation my robot reads a book. the book that gives him the idea that a soul is an object. the book has written in it a quote from Daniel Defoe. my second year assistant made the book for me. i only ( badly ) wrote in the quote. 

musics

i decided for this animation that i would have ago at making my own music for it. usually i ask for help from my friend who did music tech at uni, but this time i wanted to try it for my self. i used the programme 'reason' and played around with it for a few hours. i wanted to try and make some sad and slightly creepy music, but i feel like i've made the music too creepy and too bassey.

animation tests

finally ready to do some animation tests with the robot. i managed two short tests. the first test is a hand test, just me seeing how well the hands move. the second test is an eye test, here i am trying out the replacement eyes. 

( hand test )

( eye test )

the bear

before i carry on with the blog, i just want to say that the bear isnt treated as a character but more as a prop for the robot. i gave my second year assistant the job of making bear more me. all i made of the bear was the wire armature for her to work with. 

set is finished

finished my set, wasn't much more to do to it other than cover some foam board in black paper which my second year assistant did for me. so here is my super simple set. 

robot back panel

in my animation i have a short cut scene of when the robot reaches in to his back. i needed a larger separate robot body making so that the inside could be completely hollow. i asked my second year assistant if she could make it for me. she did a great job but the back panel its self was wrong. 

( the original back panel )

( new back panel )

i hollowed out the inside of the body. made a new panel and made the hand. i made the hand using the same method i used on the robot puppet. 

birth of robot

with story boards finished and set half way complete, i decided to start building my robot. first of all i drew him out on an A3 sized sheet of paper. next i placed an A£ sized sheet of tracing paper over the top of the other drawing.this was so that i could draw out how long i needed to be cutting my wire. 

because of the skinny design of the character, i needed to find a way of making the arms, legs and neck with out putting too much over the wire and restricting its movements. the solution was to wrap up four pieces of wire together with grey embodier thread.  

as you can see at the bottom of the above picture there is a tiny little hand. the method i used to make the hands was to get about a meters worth of coper wire, double it over and make a hand shape. then i grabbed the ends of the fingers with pliers and twisted the wire. to fill out the hand shape and to make the figures i used miliput. 

my robot puppet needs to be able to take his hands and feet off. i used K&S tubing so that the hands could slide in and out at the wrists and the feet could slide in and out at the ankles. 

next i then had to glue the K&S tubing to the ends of the arms and legs. making sure i left about 1CM of  excess K&S tubing so that there would be enough room for where the hands and feet fit in. 

i used the drawing of the robot and the traced out drawing too to see where i needed to bend the wire for the body shape of robot. then used thin wire to bind together the wire frame of the robot. 

to bulk out robots body i used pink foam. i first carved the shape out and then used sand paper to smooth out the shapes. to attached it to the body i had to cut each piece in half straight down the middle, sanded the iside to the shape of the wire and glued it back together. 

the middle part of robot or the waist was made out of a cotton bud that had been stretched out, the wrapped around the middle part of the wire. then thin wire was wrapped around the cotton wool and painted with latex so that the waist would maintain some flexibility. i then covered the body in mod rock and made three sets of eyes for replacements. 

robots story board

here are the story boards for the animation. 

starting the set

me and my second year assistant went on to work building the set. i drew out square inch squares, covering two A1 sized sheets of paper and then we both painted them. 

when i showed the above image to my tutor during a rushes panel at uni, he suggested that i just stick with the floor and make the set look like an endless space. still using this design to help give the impression of the endless space. 

set design

when it came to where my robot would be during the animation, i figured an abandoned factory would be a good place. i spent a few hours researching in to old abandoned factory buildings and other old buildings. i also looked in to old machines that you would find in a factory. at the end of all this research i did only come up with the one design idea but i didn't feel like i could change this idea in any way. 

making the bear more friendly

i needed to redesign the aesthetics of the bear. in the original drawings he looks far to mean for his intended purpose in this short film. so i made him look more friendly. i also needed to change the way he looked because he would have been too hard for make. here are a few design ideas.

FINAL MAJOR PROJECT. . . the robot

for my final major project i'm going to make a short animation about a robot who reads in a book a quote about the soul being inside you. he takes it literally and looks inside him self trying to find a soul. he cant find a soul so he grabs hold of the nearest object ( a teddy bear ) and hugs it. 


here are some of the original designs of robot and bear.  

in the above two pictures the bear has weapons. this is because these two characters have come from another idea. the original idea for the character of the bear was that he was being evil to the robot.