Stopmotion hands

Here is the first instalment of photos from the production of the St Derfel armature. The puppet is actually finished though we will be uploading the photos in batches. We are just waiting on the final scripts so we can being work on story boarding and an animatic. We hope to begin shooting in the middle of January aiming to be finished by late February. 

The first lot of photos shows the construction of St Derfels hands. These are made from twisted aluminium wire. They were then sprayed with heavy duty spray glue and wrapped with a layer of under-wrap. The excess was cut away leaving what looked like a gloved hand. We have made a number of hands so they can quickly be swapped and replaced should any break while filming. 

The hands have since been painted with multiple layers of latex. To make the latex mix skin coloured acrylic was lighted with white acrylic then Ammonia added. The ammonia is used to take out any air bubbles, this was all mixed in with some liquid latex. This is all being kept in a small sealed container. 

The latex is then painted on using a paint brush (if doing this your self use cheap brushes). Multiple layers are applied to slowly build up the hand. 

Production update

Been busy finalising how the puppet for the Ancient Cwmbran project is going to be made. Production on the puppet starts tomorrow. The St Derfel puppet will be a aluminium wire armature with replacable parts. Found a very useful tutorial today http://bit.ly/blii5n not sure if our puppet will be made in this manner but liked the way the hands were made. I'll try to upload a couple of pictures tomorrow charting the progress.

In other news we attended the Digital Birmingham event last week. This was a two day event happening at both the Custard factory and ICC. It was really good there was a minor celebrity there the american businesses person form the online version of dragons den who gave an ace talk about online business. The best talk we attended was about online social networking and marketing. So get your strat on!!! http://bit.ly/cOUEWz my new strat guru!!

Exciting!!

Been up to some interesting stuff lately over the last weekend I attended a E-marketing course. This took place in Cardiff at the BBC building. I've never been there before so I'm not sure if this has studios or what actually happens there. The course was good fun there were lots of interesting people in attendance. The attendees were from a variety of different field including photography, producing, writing, acting, music and stand up comedy. The course was run by Cult Cymru, I'm attending a finance course run by them at the end of November. I picked up lots of useful and interesting tips on how to make better use of the internet. I now also feel I have a better understanding of how search engines pick up web site and how to get higher up search engine results.

The most exciting news is a project we are going to be involved with details can be found here. We have had an initial meeting with Richard Davis and received conformation during last week. We will be providing some animation for educational packs with St Derfel as the main character. This week we will be going to see the St Derfel statue then production will begin on a puppet. We plan to try and get animating as soon as possible. Hopefully we will be able to keep a running Blog of the production.

Busy Busy

BIG NEWS!!! the Rockpool film is to be shown at Se ma for festival in Poland. It is their first festival as a celebration to/of stopmotion celebrating 100 years. I recieved contact from Tim Allen who is over in Poland working on a film offering a place to stay while the festival is on. Unfortunatly I am unable to attend the festival due to other commitments which is pretty bad news. Maybe this will change but its unlikely.

The last couple of days have been very busy. On tuesday there was an online conference with advice on how to improve websites. This is was only of a small amount of use, though some modifications have been made to the website since then.

The rest of wednesday was spent trying to increase the web presence of Blades Animation. A new and potenially useful discovery was made yesterday BT Trade Space. This is basically myspace with a business spin here's mine http://bladesanimation.bttradespace.com/ please check it out and set your own one up then we can favourite one another. It seems like a good idea but the site is a bit slow I think maybe there was a problem with the server. The result of this was when I tried to post on the lounge community it first said that nothing had happened so I tried again and it still didnt work then it turned out it had posted my message 6 time's so I look a little incompetent. This happened this moring when I was trying to favourite some cool businesses.

Today the online messing has continued though Blades Animation was joined by a film maker/director Malcolm Kennedy. Who spent the day updating his own online presence.

Adjustments to our main website have been made a new contact form has been added and a couple of minor alterations. In the coming weeks the site will be getting a big update with lots of new info on the services we offer.

We have signed up to attend some interesting work shops covering finance, emarketing and some business networking events around the uk so though may be exciting or they may be awful something to look forward to.

Cool things we have recently come across are the Works chain of discount book stores has the revised edition of Aardmans book of 3d animation for about £3 and the Coraline visual companion for about £3. We also came across this cool website worth checking out http://www.indiemoviesonline.com/ it has great film reviews and lots of free films to watch.

Thats about all for now.

What's going on

Hello if you are visiting this blog for the first time. This is Blades Animations official blog and will be the place to keep up to-date with what we are up to. Currently we are setting up our online presence we have a twitter, myspace, facebook and a website. So please check all this stuff out and add us if you are on any of these.