Lightening my load....

Veteran lighting guru Bryan Garver made a guest appearance at Angry Puppet Films today. Bryan has generously agreed to set the lights and the mood for my next sequence of shots. In addition to lighting multiple set-ups a day in his role as DP on Robot Chicken, Bryan has worked on a vast variety of high-end jobs in Portland, Oregon.....The other west coast center for stop-motion fun. I'll post pictures of the progress as Bryan lays in layer upon layer of creamy life-giving halogen bliss!

New Link Alert!

If you didn't already notice the new link over there ----->

Have some fun and check out Harv's film "The Unbreakables" at Harvaland. If you don't, you must not like to have fun or something.

Direct link to The Unbreakables site!

Aw snap! Harv and Liz are bloggin' yo!

Make Out City Studios Blog site!

More On Orel

Adult Swim recently posted a really detailed interview with Dino Stamatopoulos, creator of their latest stop-motion show "Moral Orel". He gives some nice insights into where the ideas for the show came from, and tips his hat to the other creative folks involved with the show.

Go read it now!

Armed and dangerous.

I finished the robotic arm and got it installed on a nice little linear bearing mover with my rotation table on top of it. The arm can reach any part of the set in natural (though mechanical) poses. I don't want to say too much about who or what is attached to the other (off-screen) end of the arm. The pictures below are pretty bad, and the set still is not lit, but it gives an idea of what's going on there.





And this is the Tom Brierton armature that is mostly hidden under the mechanical bits.....




Now for lighting and then on to animation!

The next part...

Very soon I will have some new stuff to show here in the blog. I've been working on a puppet (of sorts) to go with the console set below. It is a half-scale robot arm that I have been putting together out of bits of this and that from my bins of parts. You can never have too many parts. What may look like piles of junk is pure raw material for model building. I have saved so much stuff over the years that I have fifteen or so big plastic bins out in the studio filled with everything from model parts from kits to trashed electronic components. I'll be the first to admit I cannot design well on paper. My ideas come best when I am just noodling around with random pieces, seeing what fits together and looks cool. Sculpting with shapes.