Making the caterpillar part 1

I will be talking through the process of making the caterpillar puppet for my Stop-motion animation for my final college project.

From concept to reality

I had done the concept art for my caterpillar character now it was time to make him,
I had chosen to make puppets over the wallace and gromit style clay figures as my experience of using clay models had not been a good one espeicially as I had to remake the models for my first stop motion animation because they had melted in my hands.

From my previous experience I had also found that making models that where lightweight helped when moving them around so i needed a base for my model that was light and also something that could be moulded into any shape I wanted, I chose styrofoam.

I drew the shape of the caterpillar on a block of styrofoam and proceeded to carve it out, a bread knife or saw works well for this.

This is my second go at the caterpillar, unfortunatley I lost the first lot of pictures. This failed attempt was a godsend because it helped me realise that i had to change the characters shape slightly in order for it to stand up. That is why the drawing on the styrofoam is slightly different to the concept.

After I had carved out the rough shape of my caterpillar I proceeded to carve more detail, a craft knife works best for this, I calved small slivers of stryofoam at a time to avoid ragged edges, this is much better when sanding the styrofoam down later.

I carefully carved the detail into the sections of the styrofoam so that my model could take its shape.

After I had done this to my satisfaction i used a knife to seperate the top part of the caterpillar from the bottom as the caterpillar had to bend without falling over so i needed to seperate the parst so that the top part could slide forwards.

I carved the segment detail out of the top half of the caterpillar model with a craft knife.

I took a section from the bottom of the caterpillars body so that I could put the armature in place. The armature needed to be present so that the model could bend forward.

I filled the gap in with clay so the clay did not fallout of the model and this would also allow the modelling material to stick to the foam body as had found out in my research into how they made professional stop motion animation models

I covered the armature feet with cloth to tape to help the moddeling material stick to it.