my armature snapped :(

I was determined to get this damned animation done this week, but oh no... something else had to happen, last week i got marker pen on the face of alice and had to completley rebuild alice.

you can see the marker pen, just above her lip, me "the idiot" thought it would be quicker to colour her lips while they were attached to her face.

this week the armature snapped, and alice can no longer bend... I have three shots left to film and guess what, all of them involve the character bending, I am tempted to prop her up with a bit of invisible wire. or attach the top half of her body onto a stick and stick it in some plastecine and move her that way.
This little lull has made me realise that the armature has to be fit for duration.so that it lasts, or else there is no point.

This is as far as she wil bend without falling over, literally she will fall after a few seconds of standing so its just a case of snapping the shot and grabbing her before she gets a crack in her face (again.

I may have to persuade someone to "hold" her while I take the snaps.
I HATE YOU STOP MOTION ANIMATION.

armatures - are they fit for duration?

The real problem was the the armature I made was not fit for the duration of my animation, so it bent for a bit, and then the wire started to get weak,thats why my characters cant walk properly anymore. it wont be long before it snaps altogether so id better take it easy, this will be at the expense of my animation, but making a new armature is out of the question because i will have to take the puppet to bits, and I just dont have the time left in the project to do that. it would look different too and that would be bad for the whole thing, and may confuse the audience.

The only solution I can think of is to try and change the scenes a bit so the characters can move but limit bending the armature, my animation will not be as good as I had intended but its my only option now.

The flowers didnt work and why

I conducted many experiments into the creation of the flowers but i felt that none of the ideas I created met the audience needs.
I looked again at the pictures from the professional stop motion animation scenes.

I looked at the flowers in this scene that were made of plastic and realised that it was there precise shape and form that made them look so good.

Notes on the flower.

I made notes on what made the flower in the professional stop motion animation look so good.
I made a list of the visual language of the above flower to help me create the same/similar language

• Realistic shape
• the leaves were present
• realistic colour
• more than 1 colour
• centre detail

 I had spent so much time conducting experiments into the making of the flowers, there was no way I
could achieve the same level of detail as these ready made fakes.

I thought to myself "would it really hurt if I used ready made flowers for my scene?" it would depend how they looked on the scene. I had trouble finding any ready made weeds as artifical flowers tend to be replicas of more fancy plants, the closest thing i could find were these.

I put them in my scene to see how they looked and I was impressed at how good they looked.

The colour orange in them had a really good contrast against the blue background.
It was confirmed. These were the flowers that I was going to use for my scene.

puppets talk the talk but cannot walk the walk

I have no problem with lip sync in animation, I find the lip sync programs easy making the phonyms and animating just requires changing the mouths, SIMPLE.

I AM HAVING SERIOUS PROBLEMS with the movements for my characters "walk" even though ive done it before it seemed to be working at first, but now its not.so I decided to look at some examples of how the pros do it, and found a vid of characters walks on the internet
i found one good example where small pins where used to hold the characters feet in place, if most professional animators do this then its no wonder I was having trouble.

maybe if I could use this method i wouldnt have to smear my characters feet into the ground of my set, the armature has already snapped on the right shoulder and elbow...

maybe I have been using the wrong technique.

i should know how to make a character walk by now..... i tried to find some walk cycles like the one above, but its just not the right sort for my skinny legged alice character.
i cant understand why alice walked fine at first.... i will find a solution to this problem and post it in a future post.

Technical issues - Who messed with the lights?

Great..... This is all i need.
I am animating my final scene and one of the bulbs in the lights has started to flicker. when i though nothing else could go wrong

problem solved

Luckily because i was animating in twos i was able to copy the good pictures and delete the rubbish ones.Unfortunatley some pics were both dark, but i managed to rectify it where i could.
well if anything it looks better than it would have before hand if i hadnt of done this.

close ups or midshots for stop motion

When i was animating my alice in wonderland animation this week, i found that when the character was not quite in the scene the camera would not focus on anything,this was really frustrating for me, as i really didnt want any blurry pictures this time round.

as you can see in the above image, it is blurry and out of focus...

the image becomes more clearer as alice comes into view in this midshot...

this is a close up of the same shot, i think the midshot works better.

maybe if i include some flowers in the background, the camera will have something to focus on and it will be less blurry, ill try it first thing monday morning.