Puppet Project

 Puppet Project

I chose my mother to base my character around. I used photographs from her life and positioned her to recreate the angles and feeling behind some of the photos. ​​

My mother is very family-oriented and headstrong. She was raised on an Irish farm, the middle child in a family of 17.  Growing up on a farm conditioned my mother to be a hard worker, used to long day hours and an attitude of 'get on with it' in any situation. Her work ethic led her to create multiple successful businesses in hospitality as well as major success in real estate in several different countries. 

One of these drawings is based on a photograph of my mother on the first day of her first business venture - opening a small Italian style cafe named 'Buon Appitito'. 

The majority of these photos centre around family which is how I mostly associate my mum. She is always first to greet people and start up meaningful conversations no matter who is the recipient. She often gravitates towards the children in any family gathering, making sure to be openly affectionate to everyone.

Mother and her five children, 2010.

My mother's clothing usually consists of black work clothes on weekdays and colourful tops or cardigans when in comfortable settings. She mostly wears pink or blue in various shades and tones. 

Mother and daughter sharing a beer, 2024.

Zoo trip, 1996.

Profile of my mother, 2024.

Auntie Sheila's wedding, 1987.

My mother is now retired with plans to move to their Spain property, her favourite place to be. Both of my parents wish to help one of my brothers in real estate in the Canary Islands before the end of the year.  

I used my mother's likeness for her facial features and her preference for coloured jumpers and simple trousers. As I am basing the appearance of the puppet around my mothers appearance in the late 80s, a lot of her fashion and personality were influenced around the time period.

During the late 80s, 'The Troubles' was a conflict involving the independence between Northern Ireland, The Republic of Ireland and the UK. This caused her to fear for her safety, and she fled to Galway to escape the bombings and militia assassinations in her hometown. There, she built up a life of wealth from extreme poverty. The farm she grew up on developed her strong personality, a strong work ethic brought out her ambition to do well for herself and she seized the opportunity to make her life better in Galway. She used this new wealth to share with her mother, so that her mother could continue to work on her farm without financial stress. 

She stayed in close contact with her large family even though they lived far away, often making the dangerous journey to spend time with them. 

This sketch of a living room is based on our home in Galway. I remember the roaring fire every evening, and fighting my other siblings for the extremely satisfying chore of scooping the ashes from the hearth to the bin. I remember my mother tossing and adjusting the flames without needing the fireside tools, unbothered by the heat or burns, yet scolding us if we ever went near the fire without a metal guard protecting us from the flames. 

After listening to a lecture regarding exaggeration in animation, I decided to embellish what was real. My second location illustration shows a more wealthy living room with more antiques and Victorian-style furniture. While this is not completely accurate from my mother’s house, I know that at one point she did own all of these items and since got rid of them when she had children as they were extremely fragile and mostly made of glass and marble - dangerous for her five young and curious children.

She is viciously protective of her family, and known for being level-headed and reasonable in any situation, listening and thinking before anything else.

For my stop motion animation, I plan to film in my shed. I want a simple 20-30 second clip of a calming scene. I was inspired by LoFi clips from YouTube where nothing really happens, just calming music and a simple scene that encourages healthy studying for students. I plan on my character to first walk into the scene walking towards the bookshelf, picking up a book, then finally sitting in the chair to relax.

As we are working with interior design students for our sets, I tried to make the design as clear as possible while also allowing whoever will design my set to have create liberty regarding colours, textures and overall appearance. I hope that they will consider my desired theme for the animation while also making the project their own.

The process of creating this face was simple and required patience and a delicate hand. Once I sand the surface to a smooth shine it will look even better.

I used watercolours to lightly paint blush and bring colour to the face, but I noticed the left eye to be slightly off centre and wish to fix this. 

I used thread to replicate the hair, and to keep it in place I sprayed hairspray on my hands and gently rubbed it along the thread to avoid a crispy and wet appearance. This way the threads will hold in place unless deliberately moved by me. 

The pink fabric I bought for the jumper would fall off a lot as the fibres were extremely delicate. No matter what fixative I applied to the fabric, I did not like the finished appearance. I instead changed my original concept and used small patterned lilac fabric to replace the fuzzy pink jumper. I am not entirely confident in hand stitching fabric, especially when the sizing is so tight and small. My ordinary techniques were not applicable and resulted in an unappealing bulging stitching that I tried to fix many times. 

The set for my stop motion was slightly disappointing. The detail from my sketches were lost and it seemed that the interior designer I was paired with did not take heed my measurements for my doll. This made framing essential for my animation to give the illusion of correct scale. I found it incredibly difficult to do this, and with a lot of trial and error I eventually figured out effective framing.

When testing the lighting in my animation shed, I found that the lighting often flickered. This caused the movie to have obvious shifts in lighting as the frames changed. I changed the bulbs many times and bought several different lamps to try and rectify this but could not find a solution. I later found out it was an issue with my recording equipment as the camera focus was set to automatic instead of manual, and changed back to automatic after each frame was taken. This was most likely due to the software having issues and I could not reshoot the film due to time constraints. 

If I were to film another stop motion film I would use different filming software such as Dragonframe that would not have these issues. I would also like to better time my sequences as the beginning shot of a simple walk cycle passes by too quickly with slightly jolted movements. The tripod I used was cheap and not sturdy, consistently moving even though I made sure not to touch it. If I were to refill I would invest in a better tripod that would not self adjust.

Overall, I am happy with the simple sequence and the editing. I would have liked the set to be more to scale but I could not change this, I also would have preferred a longer scene to tell a story but I tried to keep to 20-30 seconds. This project was a wonderful, if extremely taxing, experience and I was eager to learn and take part in the process of stop motion, I would love to continue this style of animation.