Production notes from the pumpkin patch....

This was my first entry in the StopMoShorts festival (duh!), and my first completed film. I've got a project I've been hammering away at for a long time now, but doesn't seem to be happening, and here I got this little film done in about a week! Actually animation only took one day. I spent maybe a week on fabrication, during which I figured out some new (extra simple) methods of putting together a puppet and dressing him up. I had a lot of pictures of it under construction, but suffered a massive computer crash and lost them all. But here are a couple of pictures of the set that show how tiny it is, and how simply constructed:





I built the set on a piece of plywood clamped to my table (so I didn't have to drill holes through the table itself). Pumpkins were made from polymer clay, except the lead pumpkin, who was temperamental and demanded to be made from plasticene. The 'straw' is actually a handful of pine needles just laid there. Given more time, I probably would have glued it down securely so it didn't twitch around (which it did). The dirt is styrofoam from a packing carton that I carved with a drywall saw and painted. You can see the edge of it in the second picture. I made the pumpkin leaves by crumpling and tearing some thick green paper and drybrushing over it with a darker green, then I taped them onto wire stems. In the background you can see a big piece of muslin that I aimed a blue light at to create a sky.









The armature for the puppet was made from twisted aluminum wire with gaffer tape wrapped around it for bones. I used some cheap plumber's epoxy putty for the chest and pelvis, and wrapped everything with some kind of synthetic padding material that I had laying around. His pants are the first two fingers cut from a cotton glove and dyed with acrylic paint, held onto his waist with gaffer tape, and the shirt was cut from fabric from a hobby and doll shop specializing in miniature patterned fabrics for making doll clothes, which I simply glued on directly to the synthetic padding material with superglue and Elmer's Glue-All. It worked remarkably well... probably better than if I had tried to stitch it together. The knife is just an X-Acto blade with an epoxy putty handle, and I drilled a hole through the handle and superglued it directly to his arm wire, so it's permanently attached. Then I just sculpted the hand onto it. I was pleased and quite surprised with the reflections off the blade when he brandishes it in the movie. I had to cut off his head for the final cataclysmic scene, so he'd fit a little deeper into the carnivorous pumpkin, and of course his feet as well. So I basically finished fabricating the puppet, animated it, and destroyed it all in one day.