Su Blackwell

Doing research related to my project, I've been directed to Su Blackwell, and thankyou so much to my tutor Rob for steering me in her direction. Her work is incredible, mostly still pieces and installations but all made out of paper. They are so beautiful and inspirational, and I had to share them! You can find plenty more on my Pinterest account too, but these are the ones that relate the most to what I'm aiming for in my project.

Final Book Selection

        

            

                           

Check out my Pinterest!

To make my life a little easier, I have now joined Pinterest.

I put a lot of my own images on there, including photographs I've taken for the Taxonomy project and my own archives and reference material, so feel free to nip over there and check my Pins out.

ejackson1193

Taxonomy Ideas

This project will be all about Taxonomy; The practice and study of the classification of things or concepts.

The data collection is just a starting point though. I'm going to create a photographic reference board, if you will, and use them to create a final animation inspired by the original images.

As you may know from my previous work, I'm an aspiring stop-motion animator, so I want to collect materials that will ultimately allow me to work in my favourite medium.

Here's my idea brainstorm.

As you can probably tell, the best idea I've had is the one that will allow me to use Stop Motion as a medium. I'm going to collect images of books to start me off so I can start doing some concept art and storyboards, but my final piece will be a paper stop motion of a figure entering and emerging from fiction books (I think non-fiction will be too boring, and there aren't many characters to experiment with) with attributes of the book it has just exited. An example would be when it exists an Artemis Fowl Novel with a dapper suit or a Neutrino Blaster.

I know I'm going to enjoy this, my final idea made me more excited than all the others. Plus I definitely need to do more stop-motion animation, as I wasn't all too happy with my last project, but I now have a camera shutter remote and a determination to make myself proud with this project, because as they say, when it comes to the creative arts, the hardest person to please is yourself. 

'Imperfect'

My final film! It's a compiliation of the making of my puppet in live action, and then a few stop motion pieces to illustrate the puppet coming to life. The film is 'Imperfect' and metaphorically illustrates coming to terms with yourself and who you are, what you look like, and being happy with what you've got. Because nobody's perfect, and you can only really be yourself when you accept that you are happy to be Imperfect.

Puppet Climbing Stairs

Another video to be included in my final film is this of my puppet climbing a clay staircase to look at a drawing of 'the perfect model'. The camera is quite shaky because I couldn't get hold of a shutter remote before I filmed so my constant pushing of the shutter button made a lot of camera shake.
On that note I think this is a good time to review all the problems I had, as at this point all I need to do is convert the full film to a mov file.
Firstly, the clay I used for the original sculpt was the wrong sort, and the non-drying, oil based clay I made the second hand and feet sculpts from was miles better, plus using this clay means that I can reuse it when I'm finished casting.
Secondly, my lego leaked a lot, up until I learnt not to be too sparing with it and just about coated the inside of the lego walls.
Time was a big hindering factor, and had I realised that the plaster and silicone should have had more time to set I would have given it. Unfortunately I was hasty, so the plaster moulds repeatedly fell apart or were too wet to properly keep their shape. As for the silicone, the hands were OK aside from some bubbles, which will be solved as my pouring technique improves, but the silicone mould for the head could have done with another couple of days to really dry and hold it's shape.
If I had done that part this problem wouldn't have occured, my mis-shapen head. Because the silicone was still very malleable I didn't realise that as I put it back in the cup to make the plastic cast it became bent out of shape on the inside, so my puppets head is slightly caved in on the upper side, but I saved it from being too noticable by redesigning the hair piece.
And finally, the camera shake, which can be rectified as soon as the shutter remote I ordered has arrived. 

Armature Final

This is the final cut of the armature to be used in my Stop Motion film.