First Time Animating an Armature

When I first got my Malvern Armature ahead of the Aardman Academy course, I had the sudden compulsion to run outside and animate it in the snow. It was the first time I’d ever animated a puppet! I didn’t anticipate the movement of the shadows being so dramatic, but I kinda liked the effect in the end.

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In Aardman’s Stop Motion 2 course, we’re learning lip sync. We have a sticker pack of 16 basic mouth shapes, which is a great start, but feels a little unsatisfying. So I embarked on some R&D to figure out how to make my own.

First, I took a video of myself reading the slowly reading my text, making sure to exaggerate the mouth shapes.

Second, I airdropped the video to my laptop, and traced each mouth shape onto a piece of white paper.

Third, I made the lip shapes & mouth shapes into two separate vector files using Inkscape, and also made a “teeth” .png which I loaded into my Cricut software.

Fourth, I cut the mouth and lip shapes out onto film negatives, and the teeth onto white sticker labels.

Fifth, I painted the negatives with dab of red where I needed a tongue, and got a single brushstroke across all the lip shapes.

Last, let it dry, and assemble!

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