Mike Tharme, Continuing the Snowball.

Now that I'm starting to come closer to building the set I've been looking closely at Ray's original sets for his Evolution project and Fairy Tail shorts, namely Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Grettel. A young Ray Harryhausen animating Hansel and Gettal for his fairy tail short stories (Photo courtesy of the Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation) Before I make my set however; I have one hindrance that Ray didn't have; I only have a small space ,roughly 9ft by 7ft, in order to film my animation I need to be clever with the set design and set up. In order to try plan the use of my space and how much room my set will require I'm going to make a 1/8th scale mock up of my set space (I found a useful online converter via scalemodelersworld.com ). Using the university's lazer cutter on some black mount board, I am able to cut out all the pieces to make miniature "animation tables" and the rough scale of the "puppets", any waste...

Since my last post I have made some alterations to my Xenotyrannus Rex armature before I start to apply the upholstery foam. I had made a double joint "collar bone" in the larger arms to give a greater range of motion for a more creature performance, but due to issues with the double joint crumpling up during animation tests I removed the double joint and attached a new single joint instead. However, this also did not work as I had planned. Eventually I admitted defeat and went back to a design I knew worked from Ray's own tests in the late 30's and early 40s. I took the joint acting as the shoulder blade and twisted it from a downwards position into a outward position so the single joint of what would be the shoulder joint could still get a range of motion of back, forth and up and down, but not a full rotation like a human shoulder joint. The toes also began to irritate me with how long they where, so I removed them from the rod, filed down and trimmed...

After my last post of the Alloceratops armature, I started to notice some "flaws" in the design, mainly with the front and rear legs, but also with the future issue of gripping the puppets mid section and the length of the tail. I made minor changes to the armature design but these would play a big change in the puppets overall performance. The front legs in my earlier design had issues with holding the puppet up and the rear legs seemed to be too short during a stride due to the fussed single ankle joint. when looking at Ray's Evolution puppets and One Million Years BC puppet, I realized the scales where vastly different, resulting in the armatures for both requiring different engineering solutions. The front legs would crumple up due to the scale of my puppet, but the scale of Ray's triceratops in One Million Years BC was larger and therefore the joint was much easier to control. So I have since swapped to a long double plated joint. As a test for myself ...

My Stop-Motion Monster Puppet Menagerie Richard Svensson I   have know Richard for quite some time and have watched many of his animated videos on YouTube. Recently he released a book, which at the time I believed was a form of art book detailing his designs of his finished puppets.  However, I was pleasantly surprised to see the first 7 pages were describing his build-up processes and methods when creating his puppets. these pages are very detailed and a great source of reference for any stop-motion student that wish to learn how to make build-up puppets, especially if they want to make creature based designs.  The book is available in Digital and Printed formats. Stop Motion: Craft Skills for Model Animation Susannah Shaw This was one of the first books I ever got back in 2003, its a VERY detailed book, explaining all levels of the stop-motion process, literally from start to finnish. There are now three editions of this...

When I was a kid during the 1990s, a commercial was broadcast for DairyLea Dunkers, in which it portrays a young cave woman been chased by a caricature of a dinosaur, which catches her and dunks her into a pot of Dairylea Dunkers before being comically told by the narrator to remember to use the provided bread sticks inside the tub. I was immediately hooked and was always glued to the screen when ever I caught sight of it. The advert was officially called "Dinotime", which can be watched in full bellow. Little did I know that this was actually produced by Ray Harryhausen! In recent years I discovered that Merlin Crossingham was actually the animator on this project and Martin O'Neill was the puppet sculptor and armature fabricator. Bust of the Dinosaur puppet, used for extreme close ups left to right, Puppet on animation table with Rear projector, Camera rig set up, Ray Harryhausen and Merlin Crossingham. It was interesting to see that the productio...

Tackling the issue of turning the original 2013 sculpt of the Rex skull into a much smaller variant for the newer armature. Some of the process in this part of the blog will be new and untested to me so should make for a interesting process. My first task was to address the requirements of what the skull needed to be... Light weight Paintable Robust/ High  strength under pressure Highly detailed If one of these factor was not met, it could compromise the overall result of the skull. RESCALING Original 2013 X-Rex skull made from Plastazote and Fimo The first thing I needed to do was to reduce the scale of the original skull of the 2013 resculpt. The shape and overall design was there but the scale was far too big and was quite weighty being made from Fimo. Instead of taking up time resculpting a new head from scratch I'm going to attempt 3D Scanning the original head to 3D print a core design for me to work from. I'll be using a photographic process t...