Monday, April 07, 2008

Stop Motion Armatures Survey

A quick survey for all those people who are animating with armature based stop motion puppets. Please feel free to respond as comments or email me at andy at aceanim dot com.

  1. What do you like about the armatures you currently work with?
  2. Do you outsource your armature making, machine your own armatures or build from kits?
  3. What is the typical lifetime of an armature before it needs replacing/scrapping?
  4. What scale do you use?
  5. Is rust a problem, do the covering materials corrode the metal?
  6. Which bits break most often?
  7. What does not work (joints, materials, shapes)?
  8. Which process takes the longest; designing your armature, machining the armature, covering/dressing the puppet.

The reason for the survey is to help me (and the animation ramblings) readers to make better armatures. Although primarily targeted at stop motion animators, I'd also be interested to hear what maquette makers and other model makers are upto in this area.

2 comments:

Kramer Klaymation said...

1. They keep the puppet upright and are easy to make.
2. I make my own wire armatures out of 1/16 aluminum wire and epoxy putty.
3. I'm not sure since I've never animated that much with one yet.
4. Haven't kept or tried to keep to a specific scale.
5. No problems with rust that I know of.
6. The joints would, probably arms, but like I said before, I haven't animated enough to know.
7. Joints can move in all directions, unlike realistic joints which can be a pain sometimes.
8. Dressing the puppet would take the longest for me.

FleaCircusDirector said...

Excellent, thanks for your contribution.