Sunday, October 2, 2011

Ball and Socket Armatures

I decided after making 'Tomato Soup', in which I used wire armatures, that for my next film I would purchase some custom ball and socket armatures for my lead characters. My designs showed my characters to have quite thin limbs, especially arms and wrists and after doing extensive research I found that I could not achieve the look I was going for with an off the shelf armature kit. After a few emails to various armature builders I decided to send my designs to Tom Brierton to have two custom armatures built. I found Tom brilliant to deal with and very accommodating to everything I was looking for in these armatures and when they arrived to my door I was blown away at the detail of the work.

Here is the two armatures side by side, here you can see how thin Tom has gotten the limbs while they still have a nice tension and weight to them.

This close up shows the male character armature in more detail. I couldn't have imagined just how well these tiny wrists moved and all the other joints moved just as smoothly too. This armature stands at just about 11 inches without a head attached.

Close up of feet with toe joint and two tie down points in each foot.

And this was just for fun to test how much of a lean that the feet and knees could take, again they more than surpassed my expectations! Thank you Tom Brierton!

So there are my armatures, in my next post I will be going through padding out the puppets bodies with upholstery foam and athletic wrap, almost seems a shame to cover these up!

Thanks for reading,

Paul

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