To begin this project we were shown a piece of work that Steve had built the models for. We were then given our brief to create a similar piece using house hold products. After discussion with Kate we came up with the idea of building a piece that was a hero and villain fight scene, for the hero Kate decided to use a bottle of washing liquid cut down with the idea of a small but mighty character. For my character I had the idea of using cans because I had a large amount of these and they stack so I would be able to create a large chracter out of the many smaller ones. The character designs I began with started very basic with little change being made to the can. I then began to develop this idea with a suggestion from Kate to cut and unfold the can and slice this to give the character more movement and the addition of legs. I then researched bacteria because this is what I am basing my character on, there were many different images and types of bacteria but they all had characteristics in common which were hair like structures around the cell with longer flagella on the bottom, they all had a loose chromosome plasmid and ribosome's. My next development in the design of my character was to incorporate these characteristics to my cans, I experimented with different ways of opening up the can to expose the inside.
I thought the best way to do this was the second image because it offers more movement with each strip being able to be moved separately. I next worked on ways of making the cans more resemble bacteria by adding more detail inside the can.
This image shows these additions hanging inside the can, I chose to keep these details 3 dimensional rather than drawn to give it more depth. I decided to move away from this though because it just didnt fit how me and Kate were imagining the piece, we both envisioned the pieces being quite insect like living together in a hole and coming together at the end to for one creature, for this I decided a can like the ones above on its side would be better so it could scuttle.
My focus now was on colour, I wanted to characters to appear to be mucky, villainous and be able to be linked to bacteria, one way to do this would be to colour the cans using paint. Another idea I had was to collage with parts of cans so various logos and colours would be present within each piece, I like this idea because it changes the texture of the cans and also the different colours help to represent the frantic movement and feeling I wanted to create in these characters.
This is the beginning of the collaged piece, I made this with super glue witch I found wasn't as affective as I had hoped, it did not hold the piece together well and took a long time to bond the metal together which when sticking many pieces like this to create one character is not useful. A good thing with super glue is that it also sticks me to the cans and the piece is left with many fingerprints and dried patches witch added texture and helped to elaborate on the mucky way I wanted to portray the character. After adding wire to the bottom for legs the character was finished.
during filming after we had completed all the scenes with the smaller singular bacteria had to attach them all together to create a larger monster to try and defeat the knight. this character was just all the bacteria already created overlapped at the ends to make a long centipede like character
The story for a piece had a few minor changes throughout as we developed our work, we began initially with rough idea wanting to base it on a knight and monster type story, we developed this a little but had to make a slight change to compensate for the addition of another character, however this character was not created so we story boarded again without this character, this was not a problem though a re story boarding helped us to develop the story and rethink aspects of it.
When it came to actually animating the piece it began as a rough process, my models had been thrown away by a flatmate so I had to quickly rebuild them luckily they are not complicated pieces to build so this was not as big an issue as it could have been, after this we built the set, this was a cave built out of a plastic bag with wire in the top to open it like a mouth we used some hair rollers fashioned into trees, this was a good set it did what we needed it too
