Mike Tharme, Continuing the Snowball.

In June 2019, I went to visit Bristol for the M-Shed "Early Man" exhibition, and whilst I was there I was invited by Merlin Crossingham to have a tour around the Aardman studio, I even took the half finished XT-Rex puppet with me to show Merlin and get some advice and pointers on it before I applied the skin. Early Man Exhibition The main reason for attending this exhibition was to take a close look at the armature designs and sets used for the natural environments, luckily they even had the Ray and Harry puppets on display, next to Ray Harryhausen's Ceratosaurus and Triceratops hard models. When you first entered the exhibition, you saw the dinosaurs models on display. Nick Park was heavily inspired by Ray's work growing up and wanted to have the same feeling of awe and inspiration to other young budding animators as they walked into the exhibition. It certainly worked on me. As you walked round the corner you found the forest ...

When I began to bring down all the boxes of fake plants, model railway litchen and potpourri I saved over the past 10 years, I realized I needed help making the plants. I knew that due to size of my set I wasn't going to need many plants but I didn't want to repeat what I had made years before. I enlisted the help of my friend Amy Callaghan who had some experiences with prop making but was a excellent listener and followed instructions. She took what I explained about how I envisioned a prehistoric Mars to be like and what I imagined the plants to be like, the following photos are what she came up with in one day!

I now had to tackle making the vegetation of Mars, I wanted to tackle the trees first as they would the most important things to see on screen before the details of the wooded area becomes clear to the viewers. Unlike my 2004 version of a prehistoric Mars, I wanted to have consistency with my trees, where as before I used found dried sticks on the floor, this time I would use one straight branch and cast it to make resin copies. This was a lot harder than I had envisioned. For starters I did not have access to the right materials for making the mold walls, so I had to make do with a plastic board (which I would later regret using), once the mold walls where sealed with hot glue and the mold floor was fixed in place I mixed up the silicone; I could only do so much at a time in quantity as the mixing pot was not big enough. Literally half way through the third silicone pour the sides of the plastic board split the hot glue and silicone poured out onto the floor, I'm still unsur...