Kong puppet shaping up

Okay time to start just posting.

Me and my coworker (Steve)spent a week just doing little tests, just to get a bit of handle on stopmotion. I wanted to post some of them, but the decent ones are still on his iphone. But here's one.

I jumped in and started modeling my character. I wanted to wait until I had him all finished, but it's going slow, so now I'm just throwing up the progress I made so far. (I was pretty pleased with how the sculpting came out, but still I wish I could just get straight to animating)

Super super thin sculpey on top of tinfoil, I'm a little worried about the weight, that's why it's so thin. It's maybe 10 inches tall because it's a giant gorilla and I needed it to be big so that the humans won't be too tiny to animate. So hopefully it works out. Also just ran out of epoxy on the final foot, so one foot is epoxy covered in sculpy and one is straight sculpy, so we'll see if that works.


I was going to paint it blue, but with the funny head shape maybe I'll break with tradition and make Kong an orange orangutan. Planning on making it in post mainly desaturated sepia tone anyway, so not sure how much it will matter.

So the pupils, lids and eyebrows will be soft clay on top. I just finished last night baking the replacement mouths. I had almost finished a set, but then when I looked at them I realized they were pretty tame and lame, so I did a second round of sculpts trying to exagerate a lot more, and will use the original pass as inbetweens to smooth out the big jumps. Part of the idea is that with moveable muzzles I can maybe get a little more flexible feel into the face by translating them around the head. 

okay, so next step, wrap the body in foam, and try Jon's dip fingers (phew liquid latex smells terrible, like ammonia.) And then take these quick mock ups into papagaya and break down my x sheet for singing. And of course gotta make the humans.