After shortening the story for my animation - it was running at roughly 6 minutes - I began working on the characters to see how difficult it might be (working with clay). I managed to get the story time down to about 3 minutes which is the allocated time for this brief. Normally the story board would be the next step but in this case we have to mock up a poster for the short. As I'm thinking of making a claymation style animation I figured this should be shown in the poster. My earlier line drawing of the poster would have been misleading as it gives the impression of a hand drawn animation. For now the animation will be using clay characters filmed on a green screen background. A suitable background will then be added at a later stage, either drawn or photographed,or maybe built - time permitting.

Having a small amount of modelling clay, I began by creating the heads of the two main characters, the buffalo and the lion. They're the only two that I'll be making for the moment as they feature in the poster. They didn't turn out exactly as I imagined them but they're not bad. I think the buffalo's horns should be a more grey colour but I have to mix that yet. I think I might even make them out of filmo clay, along with any other parts that don't need to be manipulated, as it's hard things consistent working with clay.

I invested in a pearl necklace to get beads for the eyes. It proved difficult to get beads - for eyes - from anywhere other than the internet but the necklace should provide enough eyes for all my characters. I will make a set of teeth from film clay, so they will set and not keep changing when I'm moving the mouth & lips.

The lions head was easy enough to make but I'll have to make several different ones and keeping them all individual might be tricky. 

The lions body was o.k. to make. I used a few toothpicks here and there to join some parts together. Keeping the separate parts i.e. limbs and torso consistent will require either measuring everything and recording the measurements or maybe making molds of the separate parts to renew parts that go out of shape/size.

For the buffalos torso I joined two pieces of aeroboard packaging together, which was then wrapped in cling film to stop the clay from sticking to it. Using clay on its own would be far too heavy, and expensive. The box of playing cards in the photograph is just to indicate the scale I'm working to. It took three attempts to get the size right - reducing it to match the head, though this worked out well as I wouldn't have had enough clay to cover the original.

As I only have two blocks of black clay to work with at the moment, I had to create the illusion of a full clay body. The head used one full block, I've since learned that I should have used something light inside the clay to pack it out, and reduce the weight. Needing clay for the legs also meant that the torso 'skin' had to be very thin, I just about had enough to cover a direct front view.

For the legs I used 4 lengths of wire, about 2mm, inserted through plastic raw plugs - to save clay and add rigidity. These were then forced into the polystyrene body. As the model was unbalanced, due to the weight of the head and the 'skin', being all at the front, I had make a mounting base. For this I drilled holes in some MDF board and fitted the bottom ends of the leg wire into them. This was o.k. for the poster shot but I'll need to build an armature for the animation itself.

Fake fur from an old pair of slippers (not mine) came in handy for the lions mane.

These overhead shots reveal my cheat, as you can imagine the final camera angle had to be fairly exact.

This image had the background removed in photoshop, to use in the poster below.

I've put in an imported background for now as I have to make a trip to Africa to get some proper location photographs. I just hope there's some funding available?

 

 

 

Some of the images I researched for reference before making the characters. I think I need to make the buffalos horns a bit greyer and maybe make them rigid. He needs stiff horns (stop it) as the lion has to swing around one of them. I think Fimo clay can be set solid, so I'll make a mold for them and I can paint them to suit afterwards. I'll also have to make a more sturdy body for the buffalo so there's still a lot of research and planning to do.