Model Making Workshop 1

I was really nervous about this workshop because I am so interested in stop motion and all the parts to it, that I am genuinely worried that I will be so bad at it. We were given some encouragement to bring our own character in to make a wire armature of it, and again, this worried me. I've only ever done graphic design, and I have NEVER draw a character from my own head before so I was really worried. I decided to draw a mini-Morrissey, something familiar that I could start with and ended up with these designs:

I thought they looked quite fun and exaggerated and could potentially make a nice model, so I went for it. Once we were in the workshop, we were told to draw another sketch of our character but a very basic one, so that we could see the height and width and where the joints would go.

We were then given some connectors for the shoulders and pelvis of our models. You got to choose how many you wanted or how little, I preferred to do a slimmer model however I encountered the issue of getting it to stand straight later on. 

Then the next bit was the trickiest. We were given some wire that we had to measure out at 2 metres and then we had to use a drill to intertwine them quite tightly but leaving enough space at the end that would suffice as a head. Once we had now a 1m of twisted wire, we then had to start making a body! It required a lot of pliers and snipping, but even though the wire was really hard on the hands I was pretty proud of the result I ended up with! I actually prefer it here than to when the milliput is added! 

Before we finished preparing for the plasticine next week, we had to give our models some muscles/ligaments to make them more realistic. I think I used too much milliput on the head because it was becoming slightly heavy, though it didn't fall over. And I know all the models are supposed to look quite awkward at this stage but I at this point I have no idea where i'm going to go from here! 

I really enjoyed this session, thought it was frustrating and painful at times, I feel like being able to dabble with some armatures and making my own one, is slowly helping me become familiar with stop motion and less intimidated by it.