Murdoch The Seaman Puppet (Part 2)

Quick note: Morezmore is now on Instagram – morezmorestudio
Another quick note: We sell everything I use here. So if you see something useful, get it from Morezmore.

Continues from Part 1

Hands are done, moving on to the head.

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Mold.

Composition mold – to give the silicone mold a rigid frame so that it does not distort when I will push the clay into it.
It made it through several faces and started to break down. So I made another hard plaster mold of just the face and used it for the most of the replacement faces.
So this composition mold idea is something to improve on – probably only for the back of the head only, with ears and all.

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Back of the head inside the mold, baked.
The clay for the back of the head and faces is half cosclay in Warm Beige color, half Super Sculpey Polymer Clay in Caucasian Flesh color.
The mix is very soft and stretchy.

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After the back of the head is cooled off, I drilled holes for the magnets, put a piece of cardboard over the front (Oil Board Stencil 15pt paperboard), installed magnets.
Looks like I forgot to take photos of that step, can’t find them – but you will see the back of the head in the video later.

Clay slivers. They are made of the same clay mix. The t-nut with the screw is there so that I can l carefully pull the replacement face out of the mold.

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First replacement face for Murdoch. The hardest and the most tedious parts – molds, back of the head, magnets, face slivers are done. I am really looking forward to making the faces now!

Cigars.
First I made the the cigars out of clay, but they did not look right, so I made another bunch out of rolled paper.

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First 4 Murdoch’s faces and new cigars.

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Next batch of Murdoch’s faces. The aim is to make a lot of them so that animators can pick the ones that will work best.

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Making faces:

Assorted Box of Emotions.
Baked these faces and made more slivers for a new batch of faces. I still need to finish the 12 requested, plus I have a few ideas of my own. It is a lot of fun.
I really like the clay mix: cosclay warm beige and super sculpey living doll caucasian flesh 1:1. Good match to the color of the silicone hands. Nice soft stretchy mix, pleasure to sculpt with (I prefer soft) and bakes strong with a touch of flex.

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About the eyes (or lack thereof)
Here is the plan from the animators:

repost from @workshedanimation “We will be using an eye compositing technique to bring our characters to life. Puppet Fabrication @morezmorestudio -We were blown away with this effect in the 2007 short film Madame Tutli-Putli and knew we needed to implement it into the film. Motion tracking will be very difficult but it’s worth it in the end”

Composited human eye test

Chewing on the cigar test – the challenge was to sculpt two faces as close to identical as possible, only the mouth moving, so that they can be used in sequence. Turned out to be harder than I thought. Took me a couple of tries, this is the latest set. Just got an OK from animators, they can work with these.

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Cigar chewing test

14 faces made the final cut and were painted.
Next – facial hair. I have a clever plan how to do it, I hope it works.

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Painting faces

Continues on Part 3