Dung - From Beginning to End

I decided to dedicate a post to the production of my latest stop motion film, Dung!
Enjoy!

These are some of the initial sketches I did for the character designs.

I wanted to keep the designs really simple and almost realistic. 

Here is a small mock up I did of the dung beetle before I started to build the armature.

I decided I was going to build two puppets for the dung beetle, one for long shots, and one for close ups.
Below are some shots of the armature of the bigger dung beetle puppet.

Here is one with the sculpy applied. I build him so I could animate his wings (to get more express/emotion out of him).

Below is the smaller version of the dung beetle. I didn't give him animatable wings, because it wasn't necessary for what I needed him for.

And here I am showing you the puppets, before I applied some gloss, for a size comparison.

 

During the credits, you will noticed I had another dung beetle introduced... here is a screen of the secondary characters in the short (before I painted them). By this point, I was running low on supplies haha (these were the last characters/props I built).

Here I am holding up the first armature I was building for the first antelope puppet. It was pretty big, but it kinda had to be!

I built the first antelope puppet with aluminum foil and sculpy... but I decided for my second puppet, I was going to build it out with vinyl tape and masking tape... because I was going to hot glue cotton balls all over the puppets anyways, so why even waste time using sculpy... plus it was lighter.

I used the vinyl tape first, for stability reasons.

I then layered masking tape over it, so it wouldn't melt from the hot glue!

I ended up using an air spray gun, to do the color/detail.

End products below.

 Some shots of my set, etc.

 

Me animating.

 

This was a fun project, and all the hard work payed off as I placed first in the Student Film Festival at Edinboro... which I mentioned in my first post...

So what are you waiting for! Check out my short Dung!