More puppets and pin tests

Did a little more work on my character puppets. I've attempted to clean up the poor quality image on the front-facing head, but I think it's a lost cause. I mirrored the eye and cleaned up the whites a little bit which I definitely think helped but I reckon it's better just to get some new pictures. Something closer up (in better lighting conditions and a decent camera) with bigger eyes in order to help show expression would be good. Ideally I'd like to be able to take the eyebrows and have them on a separate layer so they'll be easier to animate. Perhaps I could even erase them and draw them back in?

Also made a rear facing puppet which I feel looks a bit shoddy. I'm fairly happy with the body, I think it's just the heads on all of the puppets that are bothering me. I'm seeing Craig again this week so hopefully I'll be able to get some better pictures for the head...

I wanted to see how well the puppets worked with the puppet tool and decided to just play around and see what happens. It came out horrendously. I kind of wanted to see if I could do a curtain-closing-type action, but the arm movement is too slow (easily fixed by adjusting keyframes) and the hands need to be changed as well, so they look like they're actually grasping the curtains. I need to try and work out how to replace them with a new image.

Granted, I didn't spend very much time on it, but the puppet tool is just so heinously difficult to work with. I'm doubtful that I'll really be able to put it to any use. I really can't get to grips with the way it works — the movement is very limited. Ideally I'd like to use it just for the legs to  give them a sort of 'rubber hose' effect like in the British Gas adverts, but it'd be pretty pointless seeing as you don't see my character's legs for half of it. I think it would just be easier to split my puppet into layers and animate them manually, using anchor points and rotation keyframes. Still, I won't discard the idea completely and I'll certainly keep playing around with it.

Update on character puppets

Had a go at the hands; very heavily British Gas inspired but I think they work!

I'm not quite sure about the side puppet. Something about it looks off to me — I think it's the head and neck. Actually, something about the head on both puppets bothers me. I think it just looks a little out-of place with the relatively illustrative-style body. I need to find a way to preserve its photographic-ness (is that even a word?) whilst keeping it fitting with the style of the body. I'm utterly clueless though.

Still... progress!

Finalised character design

Working on my final puppets for the animation. I looked a little more closely at the British Gas TV adverts to better give me an idea on how to construct the body. I took a lot of new photos of Craig (against a white wall to make it easier to cut them out) and simply drew out some simplified body shapes using Photoshop's pen tool. I copied sections of his clothing and skin and pasted them into the shapes in order to give the clothes and arms a bit of texture.

I think the legs are quite plain looking, but unfortunately in the images the trousers and shoes came out very dark with no obvious texture, so I may have to pilfer some stock images in order to rectify that. I may try making them more of a dark grey as opposed to pitch black.

I'm quite pleased with how the puppets are looking so far. I still have some minor adjustments to make, such as lighting and shadows (especially on the shirt's collar), but otherwise I think I'm mostly there. I'm not entirely sure how to go about making the hands yet. I've been playing around with them but I can't seem to get anything that looks quite right.

I'm a little concerned about the image quality, especially on the face. My camera isn't particularly high resolution and I didn't think to turn the flash on so some of the pictures are a little grainy. I don't think it's too noticeable, especially when the puppets are scaled down to screen resolution, but I'm going to see if there's anything I can do to clean them up in Photoshop a little bit. Failing that I may have to re-shoot some of the images under better lighting conditions, or using a better camera.

Character design ideas

I did some more quick sketches of Craig from the photos I took to try and get more of a feel for his character — posture, face shape etc so I could start trying to figure out something of a character design.

None of these feel "right" to me — then again they're only quick pencil sketches, so it's difficult to envision how the characters and backgrounds might work together. I think it might help if I start using more colour and different materials to create mock ups of certain scenes, to demonstrate and give me an idea on how certain elements will work together.

I think maybe I'm worrying too much. All I really want in terms of a character is a little puppet-Craig, so I don't need to go completely crazy — I think I can probably get away with chopping some photographs together, maybe on some sort of drawn or edited body?

I started thinking about rotoscoping and how that might look so I did some quick traces of a couple of the photos to see how that might work.

I don't know. I think they look okay but it's not really what I'm going for. I can't see them working as animated characters. They're too stiff I think, especially compared with the sort of backdrops I'm trying to use.

I've asked Craig to send me some of his drawings that I can make puppets out of as background characters!