Claude's Performance

I went back to the Stop Motion studio to have a practice with Claude for the first time. I wanted to use this time so that when it came to animating properly, I knew what to expect from this puppet, where he works well and where he falls short.

This was definitely a useful experience sit had been about a year since I last practiced stop motion and the first hour of set up and animating was quite a gruelling task.

When animating, I also experimented with lighting, trying to figure out which lighting worked better with Claude as a puppet as I wanted to emphasise how skinny he was for the shadows and also emphasis the crevices of his face.

Moreover, the whole point of this piece is to show him in a performance setting, so I wanted the lighting to make it look like his was on stage, in front of an audience.


Lighting Practice.

Although I really like the lighting in this image, I had moved the puppet far to close to the camera which meant it was hitting it in all the wrong places. It distorts the mask, not making it clear enough at all.

I think this is the lighting I should have stayed at in terms of general clarity of the image. However I really like the moodiness of the first image.

This lighting worked really well when the puppet was in certain angles but when the puppet faced forward it was far too bright so the light blurred out the features of the puppet as you can see in the picture below.

I also only realised after I had animated this that I wasn't wearing my glasses, so half the images I took were blurry. This could be partly because the light was distorting the image.

Here is the edit of this animation, I can see many areas that I want to improve on in terms of movement and showing clarity in the story, it is definitely unclear what is going on in areas, these are all factors I will work on when animating this properly.


As a puppet there are definitely some areas I could have improved.

Good things about puppet:

1. I think that this is quite a aesthetically pleasing puppet, it looks good in a lot of different lighting and poses. 
2. He is definitely creepy, but also can be funny. He is not one way too much which is good because at the end of the day, he's meant to be a clown
3. He is quite a detailed puppet, Im glad that the masks worked well as a general concept and it is clear when he different characters, I just need to push the posing a bit more to make it clear that he is under a different persona.

Bad things about puppet:

1. Because of the gangly, long legs, he can't quite hold all of his own weight on one leg. Even when that leg is pinned into the floor. He needs a rig to do anything more than basic movement.
2. Some of the masks broke on set, which I fixed at the time with White Tac. In hind sight, I should have made multiple versions of the same mask because they are incredible delicate.