Victoria Park

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This was taken with my Rolleicord Vb. I think the film was Ilford 100ISO Black and White 120.

"The Black Yellow Night" - The Set

The set was very basic, cheap and simple. In true student fashion most of the materials were sought from skips to keep production costs to a minimum. I built the set on blocks of wood so the whole set was raised 4 inches of the table top, this allowed me to have a series of magnets underneath the set floor that would prove essential in pining the models down to minimize unwanted movement. I learned from making my first stop-motion that it's a good idea to glue down and secure anything that can move that shouldn't. When I was filming I was often in very low level lighting and so there was the occasional nearly catastrophic stumble in to the equipment or set. if i hadn't gaffa taped or super-glued down everything from the bed to entire set itself then large chunks of filming would be rendered useless.
The lighting consisted partly of angle-poised lamps and partly of LED's. For the scenes that required low level lighting I used a mini lighting rig made of LED's. I found LED's to give an interesting light to the set and they were also very adaptable in trying to find the right light for each scene.
The final scene of the giant wasp taking flight above the grandpa's bed required me to build a pulley system above the set to hoist the wasp up in small increments at a time. admittedly the pulley idea was last minute and I never planned to have one from the beginning. This meant that the way i built the pulley system was based more on a fast approaching deadline rather than building a pulley a system that best mimicked the movement of a real wasp. in hindsight this should have been better planned but i am still pleased that i managed to get the very heavy model of the wasp to fly in some sort of way.

"The Black Yellow Night" - The Giant Wasp

This is my most ambitious model to date. I had the vision of a Giant Wasp being the penultimate fear for the grandpa, but realizing this character physically proved many a challenge. The character design began with initial sketches to get a idea of scale, body construction and character. I studied the common wasp to understand its physical make-up but simplified some parts and exaggerated others (and added a few spiky bits).

Character Sketch of Wasp

The armature was very much trial and error, and i never new if my design would actually hold up during the filming process. Again the modular armature parts were supplied by Armature FX and these allowed me to design an armature that hopefully would allow me all the movement i needed as well as being strong enough to withstand the animation process. As with my other models the bones or in-between joint sections were made primarily of twisted wire, with the addition of two part putty to create 'bones'.

The bulk of the wasp's body was made from polystyrene. I used a hot wire cutter to shape the polystyrene and then a thin layer of plasticine was applied for the finish. The wings are wire framed with acetate segments.

"The Black Yellow Night" - Grandpa Model

As I said before, these posts are to show you the process of the clay animation "The Black Yellow Night". I wanted to do this because when researching how to go about making my own animation i found great resources on the internet, which helped greatly in my planning of an amateur, low budget production. i am very grateful to those who share their process and not just the end product, so i wanted to make some of my own workings avaliable for other artists who may be at the same stage as me in creating their own animations.

Plasticine Model Head of 'Grandpa'

In this post i would like shed some light on how i made the grandpa character. As with the 'boy' character and the 'giant wasp', this model is finished in plasticine. i used the readily available and relatively cheap brand of plasticine called Newplast (£1.80 for 500g at my local art shop). Sculpting the head and face of the 'Grandpa' was pretty much a case of trial and error. I would start with a ball of plasticine and mold the ball into a face shape that i liked, then using wooden tools i sculpted the finer details of the face. I went through this process at least 7 times before I sculpted a 'Grandpa' that i liked.

The armatures of the Grandpa, Boy and Wasp were made using a mix of armature joints supplied by Armature FX and my own wire/putty combination for the bones. I chose to use the modular joints supplied by Armature FX because they are a lot cheaper than ordering an armature of your own design from a professional company and they are very adaptable.

Armature of 'Grandpa' with a built up plasticine belly and shoulders

Armature of 'Grandpa'behind

fully clothed Grandpa

"The Black Yellow Night" Stop Motion Animation

This is my second stop-motion animation. A six month long undertaking which was to be my final major project of my university degree. Four months of pre-production planning consisting of sketching, story-boarding, set design, set construction, plasticine modeling, armature design, armature fabrication and lighting design. The actual filming process only took two weeks, but they were two weeks of blindly stumbling around in the dark in a small hot box room making very slow progress compared to that of the real world. The final weeks were spent in post-production, creating the soundtrack and making a DVD to host the final animation.

Here it is:

The Black Yellow Night (stop-motion clay animation) from James Ednay-Cox on Vimeo.

the pictures below were taken on set during production. In future posts i hope to give an insight to my process in making some of the models and set. i would appreciate any constructive criticism on my animations as i know i am at the tip of the ice berg in my understanding and skill as an animator.



If you enjoyed this, take a look at my first animation "Lemons Stole My Shoehorn"