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Yes, I know I said I wouldn’t show any more of this stop-motion puppet for The Mare’s Tale project, but it’s not the only Mari Lwyd under construction on my work-table, and so I still have plenty of surprises up my sleeve for the production.
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I’ve decided to use the smaller proportioned head, and I’ve added another segment to the neck. The puppet is more elegant as a result, which will be help with the quality of animation I hope to achieve.
what an amazing creature! the textures are fantastic–i love the spine to tail, and the cloth, and especially those back legs!
awesome!
Zoe, I was on a horse before I could walk. I’ve had a lifetime of looking at, wondering about and drawing and painting horses, and I never grow tired of the activities. The anatomy endlessly fascinates me. Just pinning together this incredibly simplified two-dimensional approximation of a horse, illustrated that the attachment of joint to joint defines the way a hind-leg stands. In theory… and when in pieces… it appears complicated and unworkable, yet when assembled the leg miraculously falls automatically into the correct position, even without the mechanisms of muscle and tendon to tension it.
But of course this is art, and just as I take liberties with human anatomy in order to make paintings, so I take liberties with horses. Nowhere is that tinkering with reality more evident than in the Mari Lwyd drawings.
This maquette is more complicated than most of those I’ve made as studio aids, because by harnessing the optical principle of persistence of vision to the animation technique of stop-motion, I hope to create with it an illusion of uncanny life. In a Mari Lwyd drawing the dramatic moment is frozen, and the strange proportions made to work because of a fixed viewpoint. But in movement those oddities would be revealed as clumsy and unworkable. So for the purposes of animation I needed a more elegantly proportioned Mari maquette, though that elegance is something I’ll have to work to undercut with the choreography, because I don’t want the effect to be slick or beautiful.
i wish i could be there to see it perform. you give new life to every creature you address, that is certain!
Well, there are certainly challenges ahead on this one, and you’ll no doubt watch some of them unfold here!
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Yes that works, such a subtle difference but it makes ALL the difference. I like the background too, serendipity markings?
That’s my self-healing cutting-mat, covered in paint and crayon marks. So yes, definitely serendipity!
Even though the Mari of the streets depends on the hugeness of the skull to heighten the terror, I feel the smaller head seems to work best here… and for this purpose. [I know you were wanting MY approval!!! Bwah-ha-ha!!]
; ) AM
The pose here is passive, with no kinetic energy present to give it life. At this stage I’m just trying to make sure all the jointing is correctly placed for optimum performance when I put the maquette through its paces in front of the camera. In the filmed sequence the beast will be all flailing legs and streaming sheet, and that should make it pretty terrifying. Leastways, that’s the plan. Also, there are ‘replacement’ elements (not shown here) for the animation, so that the figure will be transformative and thus more elusive and supernatural.
Of course I seek your approval. Haven’t I always done everything you’ve told me to?
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What an apparition, a magnificent and quite terrifying beast
Thanks Phil. Still feeling my way though this, but I begin to see the possibilities. While my Mari Lwyd drawings may be the source and inspiration for the visuals to accompany the music and text, it’s important to create something new and quite different. I certainly would’t want to see the original images quite simply brought to life with animation. That would be pretty pointless. I need to set myself challenging boundaries and thoroughly explore this hybrid idiom of the maquette as a stop-moton puppet.
It looks like warhorse now.
Ha ha! Zombie Warhorse, maybe!