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

Hello and Welcome!

Ok, so I've decided to start writing this blog to document the progress of what will be my third short stop motion animation. I've decided to write a blog for two main reasons, the first is to keep me disciplined and to push me along the way and the second is because I know how useful others blogs have been to me on my quest for stop motion knowledge.

I'm beginning this blog having already begun making some elements of my characters and sets so expect to see a lot of progress photos up here in a short space of time while I catch up with all the bits and pieces I have already done!

This film 'Benched' is about two people finding each other and not letting their differences get in the way of their feelings for each other. I'll explain more about the storyline as the blog progresses but for now I'll finish with my character designs for my two lead characters, Gary and Mollie.

I hope this blog will be interesting to anybody who comes across it, not just to other stop motioners!
Feel free to ask questions, leave comments or just lurk around and keep an eye on how I'm getting along.
Thanks for reading!

Paul

Here is Gary and Mollie.