McTodd Animates!

Experiments with breakaway plaster

2011-10-18T21:52:00.011+01:00

The main problem I face when practising the dark art of miniature pyrotechnics is that my models are, frankly, too small. Apart from the impact this has on the realism of miniatures at such small scales, any pyrotechnician will tell you that whilst creating large explosions is easy, making small ones is very difficult. Flames and smoke are hard to scale. However, I simply don't have the space in which to build large miniatures, and this is not a situation likely to change in the foreseeable future. At the same time, I am still trying to find the best techniques to achieve certain effects, and this is very much a process of trial and error. Consequently, my experiments so far are very hit & miss.

Take the exploding bunker as an example. The bunker miniature itself is barely 15cm high. In order to blow apart, the model - cast in rigid polyurethane foam resin - was cut up into small pieces and reassembled loosely, like a 3D jigsaw puzzle. However, being so small overall made it very difficult to cut up into small enough pieces, and so the chunks of bunker that fly apart are unrealistically large.

However, I am now working on a new approach. Much experimentation has resulted in a type of foamed plaster which, when cured, is quite brittle and crumbly. It consists simply of adding a small amount of bicarbonate of soda and vinegar to the liquid plaster. These two additional ingredients react and produce bubbles which aerate the plaster causing it to foam.

It can be cast in standard moulds, but because it's terrible at reproducing smooth or detailed surface textures it is necessary to first apply a thin layer of normal plaster to the inside of the mould to capture the relevant detail, and then fill it with the foamed plaster mix. Finally, it needs baking in the oven at around one hundred and ten celsius for a few hours to properly cure and dry.

Before or after baking, it doesn't really matter which, it is easy to carve out the cavities required for small hard charges, which are then cemented in with normal plaster. The result is that the charges are embedded in the heart of the castings.

My first experiment can be seen below - it utilises the moulds for the front of the bunker (the upright and the horizontal section, both of which conceal a doorway).

This is the upright section, and shows how the application of normal plaster first has captured the brick-work texture from the mould:
This is the horizontal section on top - foamed plaster was poured straight into the mould, hence the very rough texture:
In both images you can see the cavities carved out for the charges on the righthand side. This is what the castings look like with the charges installed and normal plaster added to cement them in place:
And this is the test video:

It was only semi-successful in that the timing of the fireball charge was off and it ignited too early (but I know why and can correct this in future) and the second charge in the upper section failed to go off at all. Nevertheless, the explosion of the upright section proves the technique can work spectacularly. Shot with a Casio EX-FH25 at 240fps.

At bleedin' last...

2011-09-21T02:43:00.010+01:00

Finally, I've managed to produce something for Peter Montgomery's film. I have rather mixed feelings as the shot is far from satisfactory overall, but has some promising aspects - read the blurb that accompanies the clip on youtube as I can't be arsed to repeat it here...

And now to reveal the behind-the-scenes secrets of dead cheap effects work!

This is the bunker itself, sculpted in clay, ready for a mould to be made:

The mould consisted of a layer of RTV rubber with a 'jacket' of plaster to support it:

This is the model set (at an early stage of construction) of the building inside which the bunker is located - notice the help I received from a friend's cat I was looking after at the time (he also gives an idea of the size of the model):

This is the actual set-up, with all charges loaded and ready to shoot - the bunker itself was cast in rigid polyurethane foam resin which was then cut up with a scroll saw and reassembled like a 3D jigsaw puzzle:

Oh, and the Milliken high-speed 16mm movie camera I mentioned in a earlier post? Bleeding disaster, turned out to be a steaming heap of shite as well.

However, I now have an old Redlake Locam II 16mm high-speed movie camera to experiment with! It's identical to this one, except without the grey control box on the left:

Audible Boom!

2011-07-15T16:46:00.003+01:00

Here's the second experiment (from the youtube clip in my previous post) but with sound effects added (nicked, curiously enough, from a Jeremy Clarkson documentary about the St Nazaire Raid):

Silent Boom!

2011-07-15T16:33:00.009+01:00

Well well, a year and a half since my last post! In that time, still no animation!

But I have experimented with a new Casio EX-FH25 digital camcorder with high-speed settings! It operates on the US NTSC video standard, so 30-fps normal speed and a standard definition of 640x480 pixels (and HD as well, but that's irrelevant to this matter).

It goes at up to a phenomenal-sounding 1000-fps but at that speed the image is so tiny as to be utterly worthless. The most useful high-speed settings are 120-fps at 640x480 pixels, and 240-fps at 448x336 pixels. The latter sounds like it might be too small for decent results, but these two tests were shot at that standard and are pretty acceptable IMHO, certainly for experimenting with and for youtube (there's no sound):

Before that, I helped my old mucker Joe Scaramanga make a one-minute version of Die Hard for Empire film magazine's Done In 60 Seconds! competition. Not only did I appear as Fat Alan Rickman (yes, that's me in the still below, trying to act), but I also contributed the roof-top explosion (shot on Joe's Sanyo Xacti HD1010 camcorder at 150-fps: you should note that blurb for this camera claims 300-fps but closer inspection revealed that to be 300 fields-per-second, and therefore 150 frames-per-second):

Arse biscuits...

2010-02-01T17:49:00.002Z

Yes, you read right, arse biscuits...

Last week, I got back the film, and mini-DV tape, of my high-speed tests and they were, quite frankly, an almost unmitigated failure. At 225fps, the film judders up and down like nobody's business - that's when it's not slipping completely and producing a streak effect like a poor man's slit-scan light show (a la 2001's stargate sequence). Even at 64fps, the maximum speed of the camera's own clockwork motor, the picture is none too steady. It simply isn't up to working at anything like high-speed (and likely isn't too clever at normal speed either).

It's so awful I won't even commit it to youtube as a Dire Warning about meddling in Things Man Wasn't Meant To Know.

So Plan B has swung into action: I have dropped off my Milliken DBM-5 (a proper high-speed 16mm camera with a fucked-up shutter I got off eBay a few weeks ago) with Britain's leading movie camera mechanic, and hope to get it back in time to shoot this scene for real.

So, as ever, Watch This Fucking Space...

It's alive!

2010-01-19T22:46:00.003Z

No, I haven't yet actually shot anything with the camera, but I have tried running real 16mm film stock through it and it runs like a dream!

Recently, I discovered an incredible package deal that Fuji film are running with London-based iLab, a package called Complete16 - check it out if you want to shoot with 16mm film. You buy a 100ft (or 400ft) roll of Fuji film for £50 or £125 respectively (both exclusive of VAT) and for that you also get processing and telecineing to digital video!

It's a bit like in the old days when you would buy a cartridge of Super8 and the processing was included. And I was looking at the best part of a hundred quid for processing and telecine with some rolls of film I've already bought off eBay...

So, those rolls being effectively redundant, I decided to sacrifice one by running it through the camera at full pelt. Net results: confirmation that it does run at 225fps; I can stop and start it at will without it having a heart attack; and careful inspection of the film afterwards revealed no damage.

Now I intend to shoot some tests with a 100ft roll of Fuji film (courtesy of Complete16) and see how steadily the film goes through the camera, so watch this space...

DIY High Speed Camera

2010-01-03T22:34:00.003Z

Having mulled over various ways to modify the old Kiev-16U camera, I finally settled on a design and made the motor mounting.

This is a Kiev-16U in its natural state, with the clockwork motor unit bolted to the side:

And this is it with the unit removed, exposing the camera's internal drive shaft:

And here is my new motor mounting, bolted to the camera body:

Tests with a strip of old Standard-8 film (basically, double-perf 16mm film) showed that when connected to a 12V 5A lead-acid battery, the camera runs at 225 frames-per-second (fps)!

I'm worried that this may be too fast and strain both the camera and the film, so I have ordered a motor speed controller, which I will install as soon as it arrives.

Bang! 2: Son of Bang

2009-12-14T08:29:00.004Z

I was going to do so much this weekend past, and then I went a got a stinking cold. Nevertheless, I managed to do a couple more experiments with a crude test model building, of which the last bore fruit, with all elements of the blast timed to perfection. Actual video is not so impressive as, at normal (25fps) speed, the event is over almost before it appears to begin. Instead, here are some stills:

Tonight I'll make an identical setup to test that it wasn't just a fortuitious fluke - repeatability is vital in effects work.

Bang!

2009-12-07T19:11:00.005Z

As usual, this being a McTodd project, it drags on and on...

The main problem is that I'm working in what is, by professional film standards, a small scale (1/24), and it is exceptionally difficult to miniaturise things like explosions and flames. Also, I'm working indoors, and so the need for safety is paramount. Trying to create pyrotechnics that are small, safe and spectacular is incredibly difficult, far more so than I had anticipated, and so an immense amount of time has gone into R&D.

Nevertheless, I have finally cracked the problem of creating small fireballs. Below you can see stills from a test video I made of a mini-fireball which, at its greatest size (in the first image, before dissipating as a cloud), is a mere 35cm or so in width:

Blimey, it's been a while...

2009-10-29T13:31:00.010Z

...and I'd love to say how busy I've been in the meantime, but no, a pathetic level of productivity has occurred.

Nevertheless, I have been working on a new filming project, entirely non-animation-based - miniature pyrotechnics! For various reasons, I am working on a scene in which a warehouse explodes, which will hopefully form the climax of a short film made, and currently being edited, by a friend of a friend of a friend... This is the actual building (a shoddy composite of two photos, made so I could get some idea of the building as a whole) - click on all photos for biggitude*:

And here are the front walls of the miniature, which is 1/24 scale (around 15cm high, without the peaked roof on the right):

And here are models of some of the odd stuff littering the area in front (note the 50p coin, left, to give an idea of scale):

The walls, which are to burst out from the explosion(s), were made from foamboard with the brick-work scribed on, RTV rubber moulds were made and resin castings produced. These castings were broken up into the pieces that will fly apart in the blasts, hence the cracks visible in the above photos.

Unlike my old mini-pyro effort, this will be filmed on a 16mm movie camera adapted to run at high-speed, a rather magnificent Soviet-era Russian Kiev 16-U (courtesy of Mr Ebay!).

It's proving to be very challenging, not least because the actual building is quite boring and devoid of architectural merit, and also because, being based on a real building and location, it means duplicating the original as well as I can manage!

*Or not - fecking useless blog...

McTodd Animates! spawns

2009-03-12T14:56:00.001Z

Yes, yet again, bugger-all concrete animation activity - but McTodd Animates! has spawned a sister blog to cater for the increasing amount of caricature sculpting I'm doing now.

Check out McTodd Caricatures!

Big Pat: "Here's lookin' at you, kid..."

2009-02-27T16:40:00.004Z

A quickie post before I chip off home... Last night I remodelled Sir Pat's head, incorporating a pair of new eyes (and I also re-sculpted his hair, adding cotton threads to a clay base). The photo isn't great, as I simply plonked him on the back of the sofa against the yellow wall behind, but it does illustrate the vastly improved eyes (see his earlier incarnation)...

Why eye (again...)!

2009-02-25T08:53:00.007Z

At last, I think I have cracked making reasonably convincing eyes.

This is how...

Download a load of photos of human irises of various colours. Resize them to the desired dimensions and print them off a decent colour printer (ta muchly to my old mucker Joe Scaramanga). Fortunately, the size iris I needed coincided with a single-hole punch I have, thus ensuring perfect circularity - trying to cut them out using scissors proved a dead loss...

Take a 16mm spherical white plastic bead and flatten one face such that the diameter of the flat matches the diameter of the paper iris. Stick the iris to the flat face (I used doublesided tape, which I stuck to the back of the iris before punching it out).

IMPORTANT NOTE: Since originally writing this post, I have found that it is not necessary to flatten any part of the spherical bead - the paper iris can just be stuck to the curved surface, it is small and thin enough to conform to the compound curvature without distortion or wrinkling.

Now, take another bead of the same size and use it to vacuum form a clear dome using thin transparent plastic sheet. If you don't have a vacuum former (I happen to have made one twenty-odd years ago for some other projects) you could press-form the domes: take a piece of scrap wood, drill a hole a few millimetres larger than the bead, tape/pin your clear plastic over the hole, stick it under the grill until it goes soft and then press the bead into it.

Glue the dome over the incomplete eye to finish it off.

Et voila!

Pathetic, utterly pathetic...

2009-02-23T09:07:00.002Z

Bugger-all progress to report, I'm afraid. I have been pathetically inactive, due to a great extent to an uncharacteristically busy bout of post-food-poisoning socialising (i.e. getting pissed a lot).

However, I am working on two different techniques for making convincing eyeballs (not being at all satisfied with the efforts documented below), which will be the key to a reasonable model Martian, which I hope to bring to fruition this very week - so, as ever, watch this space!

Sick as a parrot...

2009-02-09T13:53:00.002Z

Well, sick as a parrot that ate tainted oysters.

Yes, I have been laid low for a few days by a particularly nasty bout of food poisoning brought on by a brace of oysters.

I should have known better than to eat something that looks like snot...

But now I'm almost back at full strength, I shall resume my Martian adventures! So watch this space...

Who Ate The Pie At Night...

2009-01-28T14:02:00.004Z

As a break from the Martian, I ended up spending the last couple of evenings sculpting a clay caricature of Sir Patrick Moore, telly's mad octogenarian stargazer, for the weekly Challenge on the inestimable b3ta website.

It was nice to have a task with a clear (and near!) deadline, forcing me to get off my arse and do something! And the feedback on b3ta has been nice too...

Blast from the past

2009-01-12T13:57:00.010Z

While visiting my parents recently, I was rooting around in a cupboard full of old stuff of mine and found the original model building I blew up back in the 1980s (see this thread: http://mctoddanimates.blogspot.com/2008/11/first-steps.html).

Retrieving it and carting it back home, I thought I'd chuck some photos of it on here...

See you, see me

2009-01-12T13:39:00.003Z

Well, here I am, back from my Christmas break and, as usual, I didn't get as much accomplished as I would have liked.

Nevertheless, I made a new set of tentacles and I've been trying to make eyes for the Martian, which you can see in this post.

They're just over 20mm in diameter, and made from SuperSculpey clay. I actually used the clear plastic hemispheres you can see them sitting in to mould the clay. In order for the resulting hemispheres to be slightly smaller than the plastic shapes, which will be used as eye sockets, I 'jiggled' the clay after pressing it in to create a small gap all around, before cutting it off and baking it hard.

I'm not entirely satisfied with the paint job (done using modelmakers' acrylics) and will have another crack at the irises and pupils. Note the pinholes in the pupils, made so I can animate the eyes moving in their sockets.

'Tis the season to be jolly...

2008-12-19T10:27:00.004Z

Yes, it's that time of the year again, and even McTodd isn't totally immune from its effects, so here's my own e-card to set you in the mood...

Meanwhile, due to the fact that after today I'm away from work for three whole weeks, and I don't have the interweb at home, this'll be yer lot until around mid-January!

Hopefully, by then I'll have loads of exciting things to report...

Every breath you take

2008-12-18T09:14:00.008Z

Finally, something tangible to show!

I have completed the main section of the breathing mechanism for the Martian. At its heart is a threaded bolt which causes a wing-nut to move back and forth when the bolt is rotated. This wing-nut then pushes out two hinged arms on either side. An elastic band connecting the arms then pulls them back in when the direction of the wing-nut is reversed (by rotating the bolt the other way). In practise, I suspect the elastic sides of the animation puppet would push the arms back in without the elastic band, but it's there for the video demonstrations below.

The mechanism is incomplete, insofar as it would have to be attached to a pair of 'breast-plates' which will conform to the shape of the Martian's body. The basic mechanism as shown could also be used in puppets of quadruped creatures, such as certain herbivorous dinosaurs.

To give an idea of size, the threaded bolt is around three-inches (75mm) in length, and it was animated with one complete turn of the bolt per frame, at 25fps.

The basic mechanism is shown, as viewed from above, in the schematic diagram:

And this video shows the mechanism's action:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=I-q3omo5WAQ

While this one reveals the inner part of the mechanism, with the arms hinged out of the way, just about showing the piece of square plastic epoxied to the wing-nut which prevents it from turning and losing contact with the hinged arms:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=EztfkaMzlds

Sniffle, snuffle, cough, hack...

2008-12-17T13:28:00.003Z

Well, not much progress to report, other than to say that Christmas is truly on the way as I have been suffering from a horrible cold and bad chest, experiencing various free drinky events at work, and building almost all of a friend's flat-pack furniture for his new bloody flat.

Coming back to proper fillum preparation, however, I am building the Martian's breathing mechanism, and I've made his six tentacles but have yet to attach them and cover them with their final textured skin.

Not a Little Green Man...

2008-12-02T10:40:00.003Z

Progress is slow at the moment, but apart from designing a breathing mechanism to go inside the Martian puppet, I have been experimenting with colouring the skin.

There are many ways to paint latex puppets, the most popular of which is to use PAX (a mixture of artists' acrylic paints, such as Liquitex, and a prosthetic adhesive called ProsAide, of which the non-sticky version, NoTack, is said to be the best).

However, I decided to opt for colouring the latex itself with the base colour, and will use PAX later to dull down the uniform colouring and add character. I added some latex colourant (available from the model supplies shop 4D in Aldgate, London) to a batch of liquid latex and cast new skins.

The rest of the liquid latex can be kept in an air-tight container and will be used to colour the tentacles and make new skin sections to patch the main puppet skins when the model is finally put together.

Meanwhile, this is what the main skins look like...

Ray Harryhausen

2008-11-24T09:54:00.017Z

Last weekend I got to meet a true hero of mine - the legendary Ray Harryhausen!!! He was signing copies of his latest book, the superb A Century of Model Animation, at Forbidden Planet (aka Forbidding Prices) in London on Saturday 22 November, accompanied by his co-author Tony Dalton, and his dear lady wife, Diana.

Being the type of event it was, a book-signing with the attendant Very Long Queue, I didn't really get to say much to him, other than to bumble on briefly about how great I think his work is. Ray's hearing isn't so great these days (he is 88 after all!), but he was completely charming, as one would imagine he is from his appearances of late in various DVD extras and the like.

I also handed him a letter from my internet mucker Richard Svensson, aka the Lone Animator, a mega-talented animator-cum-sculptor-cum-prop-maker-cum-damn near anything practical connected with the filmic and theatrical arts. Check out his blog on the right...

Here's Ray thinking, "Who is this idiot with the beard?":

Co-author Tony blows the ink dry while I gurn at the camera:

Martian madness...

2008-11-18T10:07:00.002Z

I decided that my Martian wasn't scary enough, so I added a load of veins to his bulging head and took the opportunity to make a new plaster mould. This time, I didn't make a bollocks of it and managed to prise it apart without the use of a hammer...

Next, I made a rubber skin by filling each half of the mould up to the brim with liquid latex (to be precise, I built a sort of clay dam around the brim so that the latex would overfill the mould, thus allowing for better trimming and fitting later). By leaving it to sit for an hour or so (damn, I knew I should have timed it), a skin formed on the inside of the mould. The rest of the latex remained in its liquid state and was poured back into the bottle for another day. Here are the results:

Next stop: tentacles

Mars Attacks!

2008-11-13T13:46:00.000Z

No, not the wonderful Tim Burton wackfest, but my first efforts at making an articulated puppet for animating.

I've always been a fan of early science fiction, H G Wells's work especially and, in particular, his masterpiece, The War of the Worlds. Everything about the novel fascinates me, from the evocative period setting (or near-future to Wells) to the setpiece battles, from the musings on imperialism and evolutionary development to the Martians themselves and their extraordinary machines.

And what great monsters the Martians are! The end product of an evolutionary process that has taken them from humanoids not unlike ourselves to being the quintessential Big Brained Bug Eyed Monsters! They were science fiction's first Brain In A Box (effectively), and were more or less cyborgs, almost completely dependent on their various vehicles as they were. Not least, they were the ancestors of British television's favourite sci-fi villains, the Daleks.

And so below you can see my attempt at sculpting a Martian (sans tentacles) from plasticine. From this, a plaster mould was made, and later I shall be making latex skins from the mould to cover the armature (as yet un-built). In a future entry, I shall go into more detail about the mouldmaking process, which will also explain the white patches on the sculpture (bits of plaster, remnants from the somewhat traumatic effort to remove it from the mould).

Hopefully, the finished beastie will look a bit more menacing than the sculpture...

What will he do?

Well, I intend to film the landing of the first Martian cylinder (which will be another chance to make something go bang!) and the emergence of the first Martian from it.

First steps

2008-11-13T13:24:00.000Z

Many many moons ago, when I were a lad, I had a go at doing special effects on my trusty, but crap, Super-8 cine camera. I had a go at animating some plasticine dinosaurs and a Morph-like man. Because the camera had no single-frame setting, I hit the button to get as few frames as possible. The results were bloody awful... I never had another go.

But, I did end up adapting the camera to run at high-speed, by replacing the motor and main drive gear. I managed to get it up to 200 frames-per-second (fps), over ten times silent 8-mm movie speed. Given my abiding fascination with things that go bang!, I built a little model building from balsa wood, cut it up, dressed the inside with wrecked floors and debris, planted a tiny blackpowder charge in it, and blew it up... Twice.

These are the results (transferred from Super-8 to VHS many years ago, then from VHS to DVD, and finally to YouTubeness):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr4gp3hyqsY

Oh dear, not again...

2008-11-13T13:13:00.002Z

I used to have several blogs. Each one lasted a maximum of around five posts before boredom/inertia set in and I abandoned it...

Hopefully, that will not be the case with this one. That's because this blog will be more focused than the others. It isn't simply a platform for me to vent my spleen about whatever happened to annoy me on a particular day, there is more of a point to it, which is to create a sort of diary following my efforts at making fillums! Particularly animated fillums, but more generally anything I can get my act together sufficiently to do...

Because my main interest is stop-motion animation, this blog will inevitably cover all the stuff that has to be done before the camera's lens cap even comes off, stuff like plot and script writing, character and set design, construction (of puppets, props, miniature sets etc.). I'd also like to have a crack at doing some live-action filming, with animated effects integrated a la Ray Harryhausen, the absolute touchstone figure for anyone with even a passing interest in stop-motion.

This blog will be scrappy, I make no apologies for that. A lot of stuff willl be concerned with experiments in filming just to try to hone various techniques with no effort at devising a story or plot. And some of it will have nothing to do with animation, as there are other techniques I want to turn my hand to.

Being a novice at such things, I hope this blog will also serve to give useful hints and tips to others interested in Old School special effects and animation film-making.

So, without further ado, here goes...