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March 10, 2010
stopmo experiment: replacement faces
by sven at 7:00 am
Lena Podesta has started up an animation study group for members of ASIFA Portland. A few weeks back I had a cold and was too fuzzy-headed to machine armatures… So I started work on something for the study group: a set of replacement faces.
Fig.1: The sculpt was done using Chavant medium plastilene on top of a piece of wood wrapped in wax paper. The eyes are acetal plastic balls, which can be purchased either through animateclay.com or smallparts.com (which now offers its catalog via amazon.com). I studied sculptures of Roman emperors as reference while doing the sculpt, which helped me bring in a few nice details.
Fig.2: The mold wall is made from Klean Klay, which Ron Cole recommends in his fantastic mold-making tutorial.
Fig.3: I used Ultracal 30 to make the mold. There is only one place in Portland that carries it… Stephenson Pattern Supply.
Fig.4: The negative image inside the mold is always creepy and fascinating to see. A number of tricks in the DisneyLand haunted house ride are based on this optical illusion…
Fig.5: I put some Super Sculpey through a pasta roller. (The pasta roller is dedicated to polymer clay only.) This is intended to be a press mold, so I simply laid the sheet of Sculpey in and firmly pressed it into the details.
Fig.6: I trimmed the edges of the Sculpey sheet, pressed two more acetal balls into the eyes, and then laid in another sheet of Sculpey.
Fig.7: To create a "skull" that this "mask" can rest on, I poured resin into the negative space.
Fig.8: Here's the skull. Notice that I've given it two bumps on the forehead as keys for registration.
Fig.9: When I pull out the Sculpey, it's pretty easy to distort the edges. The skull helps put the face back in shape — but it's not going to be perfect. A little bit of detail's been lost, but overall I'm pretty pleased with how the pull turned out.
Fig.10: One problem I quickly discovered was that I wasn't doing enough to dig out the eye sockets. On this mask, I wound up Dremeling the interior. There are still problems… On some pulls, the eyeballs are right up against the eyelids — on others, the eyes are a little recessed.
Fig.11: The first pull was a "neutral" face. For the second pull, I re-sculpted the mouth shape to represent the letter "M." I intend to do twelve faces in all, so I can have a full set of mouth shapes for lip sync.
The paint is several layers of Delta Ceramcoat acrylics. These are cheap crafter's paints — but it's invaluable to be able to use paint colors straight out of the bottle, rather than trying to re-mix the right tint every time. The top color here is called "bamboo."
One obvious problem I'm going to run into is eyebrows. How am I going to keep them in the same place each time I change masks? I'm really seeing the wisdom of having the forehead and lower face be separate pieces, which was a big innovation for the movie "Coraline."
Still, even if this experiment is flawed from the start, I think it's worth seeing through — just to find out how these replacement faces work in practice.
posted by sven | March 10, 2010 7:00 AM | comments (7) | categories: stopmo
Comments
neat to see this. i love using the roman emperors as reference!
Posted by: gl. at March 10, 2010 11:40 AM
Fabulous work, Sven! Looking forward to seeing dialog with these at some point!
Posted by: Shelley Noble at March 10, 2010 12:21 PM
excellent! I love seeing the process and I love seeing the face. wow.
Posted by: dot at March 10, 2010 5:58 PM
Nice!! I love this sculpt, especially the mouth. When do you bake the sculpey? After resculpting?
Cool beans, cant wait to see more :)
Posted by: ubatuber at March 10, 2010 8:46 PM
Why didn't you just cast the whole head in resin instead of just the skull?
Posted by: apu at March 10, 2010 10:00 PM
Hey man...
looks great!
thats pretty much exactly the same process....I went through on my dirk the daring face replacements.
Great coverage for the community!! jriggityPosted by: justin at March 11, 2010 2:54 PM
On Mary and Max, the top part of the head was hard (resin, I think) and the bottom part was plasticine. For each frame the animators had to blend the clay into the hard head using brushes and turpenoid.
In some cases with replaceable mouths, as long as you have a black recessed area inside the mouth, you can rest the upper and lower lips on top and the lip sync won't be too distracting.
If you must, you can blend the seams in post with clone stamp in Photoshop. For my film I've been using a blur tool, which works pretty well.
Here are examples of different styles of lip sync: http://www.youtube.com/user/prammaven?feature=mhw4#p/a/u/2/svc8WBKxdSU The methods used were blur, replacement mouths, resculpting, replacement half mouths, and smudge.
Here is one with replacements and no attempt to blend the seams: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc7zYWEylSU
Given that clay replacements are harder to implement because they can easily change shape unintentionally, I think you'll have more luck with hard mouths.
Good luck!
Posted by: prammaven at March 15, 2010 12:58 PM