Our Characters Part1

Our characters consist mostly of paper and thin gauge aluminum wire with tiny magnets set in their feet. I generally work in 8:1 scale so my characters will stand between six and ten inches high. Above left you see Eli and Pupface as they will be animated. Note Eli's face has no features but rather two small paste on paper registration marks where her eyes would be. All of her action will be shot over a green screen set and her facial animation will added later for composite in Adobe After Effects. Above right you can see how her face will appear in the finished animation. I use this approach on any characters that are too small for me to animated eyes and mouth during shooting. I generally keep the facial plane relatively flat to keep the perspective on the face easy to replicate when I track the face face and add the eyes and mouths animation in After Effects.

The first step in making characters in this method is to design you characters so that anything that will be added later will be on a relatively parallel plane. Your head base may be as simple as a piece of card hot glued to to a piece of 16 or 18 gauge aluminum wire. In the example above you will notice the little character with the mustache has some temporary eyes that are on a plane but the rest of the face would need to be animated when shot.

Generally it is good to have youwirre attach to the back or lower back of the face plane. Attaching it to the chin will make the head action feel unnatural. Think about what your character relaxed pose should be even as you are starting to make the head.