Applied 2: Plasticine Model Making Research

After meeting with Hayley, she showed me some inspirations that she has found through her research, that I now also want to apply to my modelling. 'Rich Webber', from Instagram is a popular character designer at Aardman Animations that Hayley found, and I really like his work. He has kept both his designs and models, very minimalistic so that they are easy to manipulate, something that I will have to keep in mind. Though I liked adding a lot of detail to the birds, it may be a bit difficult to animate them, so I might try and see if I can continue making my models stylised, but less complicated so that both Hayley and I can manipulate them with ease.

She then showed me some pins on Pinterest, and I also found some useful 'tutorial' like inspirations that we can take influence from. These sets of images gave me an insight on where to start building models, starting with the heftier body parts, and then adding the other limbs such as arms and legs. This gives you a sense of proportioning as well as being careful with where the weight lies on the models. These have also made me think outside of the box a little more, in terms of exaggerating the character or making them more human like qualities/traits, for instance longer arms to make the character more expressive. These are things that I will be thinking about for our next modelling session.

             

I also watched this video which gave me some tips and tricks for our future models. Using skewers/tooth picks to hold other body parts together looked extremely useful, especially if the model is going to be extremely light weight or even rather hefty. However we probably won't be using them if we are going to animate that body part, as it would be difficult to move that limb around without having to break the skewer, as they are not easily bent. Also, the person who is modelling these characters in the video, starts off with one large piece of plasticine, and then makes the body parts within that blob, instead of making separate arms for instance, and then trying to mould them to the torso. I think this is a clever way to make the models, and I will definitely be trying that next time.