Creating Models For 'Lizardo' (First Light Production)

To learn more about animation and model making, our teacher offered our help to one of the old animation students, Sam Gainsborough. Sam had decided to produce an animation to enter into the First Light Awards. The animation is entitled Lizardo, and is about a mutant man who looks like a lizard, and struggles to be accepted by and fit in to normal society. At a young age, he is injected with a chemical that causes him to mutate into a lizard, with green skin and a tail. This is the 4th installment in an animated mini series about Lizardo, and features a protest scene, for which we were asked to create the characters.

Our brief was to make a few stereotypical body types; a child, teenager, fat man, skinny man, fat woman and slim woman. We then had to design heads, clothes and protest banners for them, as well as create some shop signs on the computers to put in the background. We have a class of twelve, so split up the tasks between us all. My own job was to make some clothes for the characters, as the bodies could be used many times, just with different outfits and heads.

The bodies were created using metal frames for armatures, and papier mache to create the actual shape. The heads were made mainly out of plasticine, and the skin colour and shoes were also made with plasticine. The clothes were handmade out of a variety of textiles, but mainly felt or any small pieces of scrap material we found.

Our small part in the production of the animation lasted from March to July 2009, and during this time we also learnt about photography and lighting, so that we could photograph them properly when they were completed. The clothes I had to design and create ranged from office-type clothes to a punk outfit for the teenager. There was a team of roughly four of us to make them, and we had to experiment a lot to make sure they fit properly (the models were very small, so the sewing was very fiddly and difficult). The main problem we had was getting them to fit the different body shapes, as they were always slightly too big or small. We had limited resources, but managed to produce quite a few different outfits for the models.

Once everything was completed, we then had to learn about photography in order to provide Sam with photographs that he could animate them from. We needed front and back profiles, and silhouettes. Tilly Hinchley, a professional animator, came to a few of our sessions so that she could teach us what we needed to know, and assist in the actual taking of the pictures. We learnt about backbouncing, lightboxes and different lighting methods. We used three lights; a key light, a fill light and a back light. The lights were dedo, and the lightbox was homemade. We used the lightbox on it's own to create the silhouette photos, but turned it off and just used the front lights when doing the front and back profiles.