Bird Girls!

The first three puppets I decided to make were the bird girls who function sort of as chorus girls or backup singers in the story. I did this because they are relatively minor characters and I assumed there might be a learning curve to the whole puppet-making process. I was right. I wanted to keep these three bird girls pretty similar overall but with different colored feathers. A picture of my puppet-making station is below along with the yellow bird girl who was the first one I completed. Overall I thought that she was too thick around the middle and in her thighs, her feet were too big, and her armature too stiff.


The other two bird girls were made the same basic way as the first but with a few minor adjustments. The method I used was outlined in both Priebe's and Brierton's books and seemed by far to be the most economical. The armature was made of aluminum wire, sturdy yet flexible.


I used some five minute epoxy to secure the most fragile portions of the armature. On the first bird girl I used more epoxy than I did on these two and that's why she is so stiff! For these characters that much epoxy was not necessary.


The aluminum-epoxy bones were covered with lightweight foam secured with a thinner gauge copper jewelry wire and some hot glue when needed. This step was important in making the puppets as light as possible. The heads were made of styrofoam balls hotglued into place with indented eye sockets.

After that, each frame was covered with plasticine skin. Plasticine is the type of oily modeling clay that never dries out but is still quite stiff at room temperature. That's what's so heavy and so I used the least amount possible. Head and tail feathers were added in addition to plasticine eyes, seed bead pupils, and embroidery thread eyelashes.


Beaks of different expressions were made for each bird girl with Sculpey (polymer clay that gets hard when you bake it in your home oven). Plasticine accents were added to the baked beaks to enhance each expression.


The pink and green bird girls wearing their 'rest' beaks. Each Sculpey beak was poked with a toothpick before baking so that after baking they can be easily interchanged when a toothpick is attached to the bird girl's face. Below are the ranges of expression for each of the bird girls. Each girl has her own set of beaks but it is nearly identical to the other two sets.

Using the Magpie Pro Software

I've hat a lot of fun learning the Magpie Pro Software and it's proven itself to be an extremely useful tool. Below is a screen shot of the program in use. The audio file is uploaded and the frame rate is entered into the program. I'm using 15 frames per second. The program breaks down the audio by frame and allows you to attach lyrics and/or notes to each one as well as actor poses. I began by using a sample cartoon character provided in one of the Magpie tutorial files. After I had a range of expressions for the three bird girls I took pictures of each one and uploaded them to the program as actor poses. Because the bird girls all sing in unison, I find it particularly helpful to be able to preview all my characters simultaneously.
Animating or assigning poses to each frame can be a bit tedious because each new 'actor' must be animated separately. The audio file can be played by frame, by selection, or entirely, and at varying speeds.

The primary function of this program for me is simply lipsyncing the audio files. The actual animation will take place on a set and the printed frame sheets from Magpie Pro will serve as frame-by-frame directions for me. In the screen shot, you can see all four characters in the preview window, the audio wave, several frames (vertical columns), frame notes, character poses for each frame, and all of the available poses for the pink bird girl who was the active actor at that particular time.

Sets!

The jungle backdrop...more to come soon.

Storyboarding

So, in order to do the storyboards I printed off lyrics sheets and listened to the songs over and over while writing down all of my ideas. The notes I made reminded me of what I envisioned for each part and usually ended up being the actions that were drawn in my storyboard. See the lyrics sheets below.


While I haven't drawn every scene out yet in storyboard form, I do have a clear vision for every part of each song. The storyboard so far can be seen below...