KNOBZILLA, KING OF THE GENITALS!

Anyone casting even the most cursory of glances at this blog over the years will have seen that I've been arsing and faffing around forever (though horribly sporadically) experimenting with sculpting this and modelling that, trying to produce immaculately crafted foam and rubber figures and puppets to bring to life with stopmotion animation. How bleedin' ironic, then, that my first foray into the art should be a crude (in every sense of the word) couple of seconds animated gif for a b3ta Challenge!Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you KNOBZILLA, KING OF THE GENITALS!

With a plasticine monster, balsa-wood and paper tanks, and printouts cut out and mounted on card for the background cityscape (and yes, they're nicked from stills from the original Godzilla), this is about as low-tech as it gets...

Here's a peek behind the scenes:

Having only been alerted to the b3ta Challenge by my old mucker Joe Scaramanga last Friday, and then spending the entire weekend pissed due to commemorating my shuffling yet another year nearer the grave, I spent a frantic Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday preparing and then animating (not helped by half a day spent searching for all the cables and power-supply for my camera which, in an entirely and depressingly predictable McTodd-like stroke of organisational genius, had been separated at birth).

On the vague off-chance that anyone's interested, the jet of tank-crushing jizz was simulated using the amazing PolyMorph, aka Friendly Plastic, which manifests itself initially in the form of little white beads or granules which can be shaped by hand after being soaked in freshly-boiled water for a couple of minutes to soften them. Seven streams of spoodge, depicting the jet at successive stages of, well, jetting, were made and swapped in a form of substitution animation. The actual pool of spluff was made from shaving foam. Consequently, my room smells uncharacteristically pleasant at the moment...