Showreel 2014

Amish Porn Surfer

 This is Ezekiel, and he is about to discover the wonders of internet pornography. He will appear in my showreel browsing the internet, stumble upon something his innocent Amish eyes are not quite so accustomed to, and react accordingly.
In order to make his classic Amish outfit I did a bit of research and found out that their shirts never have buttons all the way down (if any, some communities prefer simpler fastenings), it's to remove temptation to open them in hot weather apparently. There was something about their hats never having a brim wider than 6 inches to keep themselves humble, and they never wear patterns on their clothing to avoid expressing their individuality, which is forbidden. So if you ever see an Amish man with a massive hat brim and a stripy open shirt just remember that even his fellow Amish think he looks like a twat.

Ezekiel will also appear in a short shot with the sloth, I like to imagine them as drinking buddies...

 This is the chair he will be sat on, it's made out of kebab skewers, Milliput and plasticine, one of the skewers will go up through the seat and into his arse, which will hold him onto the chair.

 The computer is made out of air dry clay then covered in plasticine, it has a hole in the front which a torch will slide into, creating the lighting effect for the monitor.

 Lighting test, the torch has a filter over it so it's not too bright.

It should also be noted that only married Amish men have beards, so he'd better watch out for Mrs Ezekiel, she won't like what he's looking at, the filthy bugger...

Scalextric

This scruffy gentleman is one half of the duo that will be racing scalextric cars, he was originally supposed to be a tramp but then I came up with the scalextric idea and decided to make the other puppet...

 This one, the Hippy. I wanted to have another crack at making dreadlocks. I also tried out a new way of making eyes.

 This was the 'first draft' of the character, the body is the same, but the eyes and nose are different, with a bit more detail.

Christ this hippy puppet is old, from about 2005 I think, I know, it's awful, but I was 15, leave me alone.

Here's the Scalextric track, the sloth won't be in the final animation because I don't think he's really necessary to the shot. I also removed the hippy's moustache because I felt it suits him better. The two will be racing the cars, then the hippy will be a right cheating bastard and turns on his car's rocket boosters, knocking the other car off the track and winning. Although I realise that because of the way the track is laid out it's impossible for the green car to lose because it's on the inside track, but having a crossover would complicate the animation unnecessarily and I doubt anyone will notice anyway.

Fabulous Cactus

 Yes, this is the most fabulous cactus you will ever see. He has a large styrofoam core and a small armature for his arms, they won't move, but it keeps them from falling off. His spines are from one of those fancy hairbrushes that I took apart, they work perfectly as they aren't sharp and they're slightly flexible. I covered him all round even though you won't ever see the back to make him seem more complete. I will be doing a small lip sync test with him so he has several different mouth pieces and a detachable moustache.

This is a fabulous cactus circa 2011, he's a bit more anthropomorphic with hands and accessories and was repurposed from a cactus prop from a student animation I did a few years ago that's probably on this blog somewhere if you can be arsed to go back that far. This puppet has cocktail sticks for spines which were extremely stabby so I was eager to avoid that this time round. He also had no styrofoam core so was unnecessarily heavy and had no armature so his arms broke off more than once.

French Duke (and wife)

 This is a French Duke. I turned into a bit of an obsessive perfectionist over this one, I kept going back and tinkering with it, lengthening his arms and legs to make him more proportionate, remaking his feet to give him more stability. I also dropped him on his face like the clumsy twat I am and completely wrote off his nose, but I remade it and made improvements so it worked out in the end.

 He looks purdy with no clothes on.

This is his resplendent aristocratic wife, we'll call her... Jennifer shall we? And yes it is a pig in a decadent french wig, what of it? 

 In retrospect, I probably should have made the pig a little bit bigger, but no matter, I can make this work...

Here's the lovely couple as they will appear in the showreel, again it will be fairly short.

Klaus

 This Eurotrash looking fellow is Klaus, I think he's a hairdresser, or a porn producer, whatever he likes really, either way there's probably cocaine and techno music involved somewhere. He's actually repurposed from an older puppet I made because I wasn't too keen on it and didn't want to make a whole new body. He will be showing up in my showreel at some point.

This is the original puppet, he was intended to be a hipster sound man who would have appeared in Bane's animation and accidentally drop a boom mic on his head, leading to Bane promptly eviscerating him for being a careless numpty. But after I scrapped this idea I couldn't think of anything else to do with him, so I transformed him into Klaus.

Sloth

 This is the sloth that will be randomly showing up in a few scenes in my new showreel, he was originally going to be known as the 'Euthanasia Sloth' who likes putting people out of their misery, ill or not, but I changed that in favour of a smaller role. Now he's just a sloth.

The first sloth I made was more realistic, but I didn't like him so much, so I scrapped it in favour of the more cartoony, stylistic design.

Baking with Bane.

Bane, Batman's nemesis, (or one of them at least) his mask was quite hard to get right, this is the second version, with the weird tube things made out of Milliput and painted gun metal grey. I am going to animate him baking a cake because there wasn't enough of that in the Dark Knight Rises. More cake making Bane, less shitty endings please Mr Nolan.

 And now he's a chef, the hat in this shot is far too tall and will be shortened. I'm going to animate him tasting the cake, then destroying it because he's Bane.

 The animation will be very short, and involve Bane tasting the cake by smearing it all over his mask, being angry that he can't taste it, and destroying his creation as a result.

 Needless to say, it does not end well...

LaQueefa.

 Bit of a random one this, decided to make a christmas tree angel for no particular reason, and took it as a challenge to make a puppet that was fairly large but light as possible, seeing as I was going to be essentially shoving a christmas tree up her arse. so she has as much styrofoam in her as physically possible.

 I also gave her wings and a little wand. She's not a conventional christmas tree angel per say, but this is not a conventional house, she'll fit in nicely.

So pretty... Even though Christmas is long gone now, she still lives in our kitchen, although she's suffered a few injuries such as losing a hand, a foot and her wings, so naturally I gave her a hook, a peg leg and an eyepatch. Standard.

A+C Sculpts

Been doing some sculpting at trade shows in London for A+C, it mostly involved making pretty things as quick as possible to attract people to the stall over the course of a few days, making quick, speedy sculpts in a fairly hectic environment was surprisingly relaxing, I have no idea why. These puppets have no armatures, and are mostly held together with cocktail sticks, so I didn't have time to refine them, it was basically make one, done, move on, make another, done, move on, not my usual method of working, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

These little buggers were made at a show at Earl's Court. Don't ask about the weird little green and white thing in the bottom left, it was made by some random bloke on the next stall when we weren't around and I couldn't bring myself to destroy it. The bright orange carpet was a particular delight, if you look at it for more than five minutes you go blind.

 These were done at a show at the London Excel Centre, which is probably the biggest building I've ever been in, and bugger me the sandwiches were expensive. the model with the moustache in the middle (you can say it... the crap one) was the first I made and was done in about 20 minutes, after that I started spending a bit more time on each one to make them look better.

 Some fat bloke in a Man U shirt, it has Rooney on the back because who else?

Apparently this is Joey Essex, who was relevant at the time because he was on that god awful celebrity jungle TV shite. So after googling him and being astounded that he is actually a real person and not a parody character I got to work immortalising the insufferable dunce in plasticine.

Heisenberg...And Saddam for some reason.

 After bingeing on Breaking Bad for a while I came to the inevitable conclusion that Walter White would make and interesting sculpture study, so I decided to have a crack at the iconic meth making slaphead. The bust is a fair bit larger than usual, about the size of a grapefruit, and the glasses look annoyingly rubbish considering how long they took to make. The eye colour came out a bit wrong too, they're supposed to be darker but that's the only green pen I had at the time. The picture also doesn't show the fabulous turkey neck Walter's rocking but never mind. I'm not entirely satisfied with it though, so I make make a more stylised version at some point in the future. May even do a Jesse as well...Bitch.

Saddam Hussein. This bust was originally going to be used in a short animation about a mad farmer who grows dead dictators in his field, with Saddam intended to be joined by Kim Jong Il and Muammar Gaddafi, I got as far as making this, but then decided that the idea wasn't good enough to justify making a set and 4 characters for an animation unlikely to be more than 5 seconds long. So he has no bloody purpose whatsoever but he only took 3 hours to make so I'm ok with it I think.