Building Characters in the Industry

I wanted to look further into how they make characters in the industry so that I could compare the ways in which I made my character in the workshops. I found that to make stop motion puppets in the industry there are many different ways depending on the budget for the animation and the way that I created mine was more of a cheaper method.

I looked at this method where you can buy a pre-made armature that needs covering in materials and I feel that by using a armature like this there is less change of your character's arms breaking if you're moving them a lot when animating. However, with this sort of armature you would still have to make the legs and hands yourself.

Here I found how they create hands to attach to their characters, which is extremely similar to how I created my hands for my character but they have done it separately and then attaching it later whereas I made mine already attached.

I also found that plasticine is a very popular material that stop motion animators use if they are creating a short animation. On the other hand, if it is a feature length animation big companies prefer to go for 3D printed characters, unless they are going for a certain look.

I found this armature really interesting, however I feel it would take a long time to make yourself and instead would be another thing that you would have to purchase and then mould around. These kind of armature skeletons are good for characters that aren't very human looking and work better when you want to have things like claws that have to be very moveable. This is quite an expensive option in comparison to making the whole skeleton out of wire yourself.

I found this image on the left was a lot more similar to the method I used and it is even being measured out to a drawing like I did!

Finally, I found that people create latex puppets in order to have a very flexible character that has less chance of tearing in comparison to using plasticine. This method is also not too cheap and takes a long time to complete and in my workshop we were giving a short tutorial into this method but I didn't actually get to try it. I think that in the future I might try this method just to see how well you can mould a character and not have to worry about the plasticine going hard, melting or tearing.