Not to be confused with Facts & Figures, my moldy old sculpting blog, I present: facts + figures!
What is facts + figures, you ask? Why, it's an online boutique where my friends and I sell our crafty little wares! Fancy a custom silhouette portrait of yourself? A handful of wildflower seed bombs? A set of vintage teacups? We have you covered!
Do me a solid and go check it out. I'm pretty proud of it.
Ahoy! This is one of those briefest-of-recaps posts, wherein I give you some quick updates, ordered-list style:
And that's it for now. I'm hoping to write a short book, put together a performance, and get back to work on a comic book project by the end of the month, but...yeah. Even I recognize that that's ridiculous.
So remember that blog post where I said I'd be making a short stop-motion film? Well, that...uh, happened. Since the process (or at least, my part of the process) mostly involved sculpting, I decided to write about it over on the sculpting blog instead. If you want to read through the archives, start here and go forward until October 24. Or, for the other 99% of you, here are some highlights.
On October 1, my collaborator Merci and I moved into a studio at ActivSpace. If you live in one of the cities where they operate, I really recommend checking them out. The location in San Francisco is literally six blocks from my house, and it was perfect for what we needed: a big, empty room where I could make a huge mess and, incidentally, some puppets. I could go on and on about how neat it was to be down the hall from a recording studio, a crystal healer, and two barber shops, but that's not why you're here (why are you here, exactly?).
Right, puppets. Anyway. So I spent about three weeks making puppets, which went according to the following timeline:
Week one: Relaxed. Headed over to the studio when I felt like it, made about one mold (which wasn't even usable), and felt pretty good about my progress.
Week two: Concerned. Made an effort to go on both Saturday and Sunday, pushed myself to stay an extra hour, and started to worry about my total lack of progress. And of puppets.
Week three: ABSOLUTE PANIC. The last week and a half, I was literally in the studio until 4am every night (and up for work at 7am), and even with the slave labor voluntary assistance I got from Dayna and Sean, I was seriously afraid that I wouldn't finish on time. How could I have underestimated the effort involved so severely? Well, how long would you assume that it takes to make nine tiny puppets (all under a foot high)? I bet it wasn't A MILLION HOURS, which is exactly how long it takes. To make one puppet, you have to:
AND THEN DO THAT NINE TIMES. And that's the abridged version, if you can believe it. Plus, try accounting for total ineptitude and inexperience and you've got yourself several months of work, easy.
Fortunately, all things eventually come to an end, so eventually the puppets were finished. As the wiffle ball slogan goes, "three or four of (them) are actually pretty good." So then it was time for shooting.
Last weekend, I boxed up the tiny people and took them to Merci's house, where I met Sara and Jamie, who kindly drove up from Los Angeles with four pit bulls and a Canon 5D Mark II. They are incredibly talented, and they made everything look very pretty. That's about as technical as I can get about their contribution because it was so far over my head.
The film is in post right now (nope, I never get tired of saying that), and the final product has a deadline of December 1, so it won't be long before I can share the finished film with you. So excited! Naturally, after swearing off puppets forever, I picked up two more film projects and a theater piece, all due in November.
(Go Giants!)
A blog post? I must be announcing...another new project!
Technically, this one isn't new new, since I've actually been working on it for a while. But I just got permission to talk about it, so here we are. My good friend Merci, who is a very talented aspiring filmmaker, is producing a short stop-motion film and she's asked me to be her modelmaker and puppeteer. Before I left on my trip, I put together a list of materials and she contacted Burman Industries, which is basically the holy grail of special effects supplies. They supply all the major film production companies, and now they supply us! How cool are we?
Today, the first wave of puppet-making materials arrived. Here it is, obstructing the walkway on my kitchen floor:
Squee!
Holy smokes that's a lot of stuff. And that's not even half of it. The gray clay on the left (Laguna, which is the same clay I've been using in class, coincidentally) is for holding the figure inside the mold, all those bottles on the right will eventually combine to form liquid latex, and in the middle there's an eight-pound box of my beloved Super Sculpey for actually modeling the figures. The oven in the background is what we're using to bake the latex, since we don't really want those vapors in our home ovens. Come October 1, we're moving into a temporary studio just down the street from my house, where I'll have 24-hour access to a workspace with all these materials and more. I've got just a few weeks to finish the dozen or so 9" puppets before we move in a set, a greenscreen, a carload of professional lighting equipment, and a big scary 3D camera. Hopefully, in a couple of months, we'll have a cute little film to show for ourselves.
And this is why I don't have time to update the blog very often.
(Squee!)
As promised, I started a sculpting blog to further my lifelong (ok, maybe month-long) quest to become a model maker. Of some sort. I haven't really figured that part out yet. I figure it's a useful skill to have, though, whether I want to keep making masks (or making better masks), doing character designs, or getting into other areas of visual effects. Of course, being me, I only made about six tiny sculptures before I started researching MFA programs. But I've reined that impulse in and signed up for a gentle introductory class instead. (Hooray for maturity!)
I'm only 24 days in, but so far I've managed to post something every day. Here are a few recent figures:
|
|
I figure I've probably only got a few more days left before I go pro.
Here's the link: facts & figures
Nothing down here but the copyright. © 2024 Cari Trease. All rights reserved.
