Kush’s Armature and a Weekend Trip

I have been working on Kush. She is going to be an eagle like bird living on top of the tree of life. She is going to have a wire armature, supersculpy head.

As it is spring here, we went to sea side on saturday. And I had the armature with me.


Hey.. can I fly..


I am a bird can fly.. making an armature in a beautiful spring day by the sea.

Sunday; a trip to a wonderful place 1,5 hours drive away to our town by car. It was a great chance to take Lumix FZ-50 to shoot all day long trying to get used to camera. I used to use Canon 350D and Lumix’s settings are soo different. I need to spend some more time on it to take better pictures. So, our sunday trip:

Our friends took us to a secret beach. Not so many people knew this place and it did not even had a road to go. We had to go down the hill walking with all of our packs.

Zeynep (my daughter) was very happy with all the climbing and ofcourse swimming, playing. We tried fishing but no success… Mert took his camera and went down under the sea immediately.

I cut the meat and Ismo prepared sticks for cooking. Hmmmmm.. Just sooo delicious on a camp fire.

Climbing back was a little pain after a long day. Zeynep had a lot of fun saying -hey mum there are monsters here in the forest…

Edit: Adding the following pic for Shelley

Beautiful cottage… I wish I took more pictures of this..

And Adem’s Ball&Socket Armature…

Here he is Adem’s armature. I received this armature couple weeks ago but did not have a chance to post here. It is simply beautiful. Many thanks to Erol Akbarci who made this armature for me. It works great!!! Very clean, carefully produced.

This is 5.5″ You see that he has very long arms. I also had some additional parts; longer leg, arm and body connection parts. So, in the future I will be able to replace the parts to have different armatures with different proportions. He can be 7″ longest.

Here is the drawings I sent him for production. (texts are in Turkish) If you like to download a larger size of this drawing you can go to downloads  page. There you will also find another drawing showing the additional parts..

Panasonic Lumix FZ-50… Back to town with my new camera

I was out of town for two weeks. One of my relatives had a serious operation. She is doing a lot better now. We were lucky.. we got a very good news after waiting for two weeks.

I am back to town in my studio. Right before we came here, I searched for Lumix on the net and found a good deal. It was a second hand FZ-50 and the owner was living very closed to where we were staying in Istanbul. So, I now have a Panasonic Lumix FZ-50 🙂 In good condition all with its box, manuals, warranties, cables, etc,..

Here are the reasons for me to select Lumix for stopmotion:

– Flicker free
– Live-view that does not overheat
– Able to shoot in 16:9 widescreen HD size

If you like to read more about Lumix you can visit

http://darkmattr.blogspot.com/search/label/Lumix

I have not tried this camera for stopmotion yet. But, I am sure it will perform great! I have been reading its user manual. I will post more when I start using FZ-50 for stopmotion..

busy beeeeee

It has been a week since my last post. So, I want to post to say that I am alive and have been working on a lot of graphic design and flash animation works. It looks like these projects will take another very busy week and then I will be back working on my film. Even if I am busy with other works, I always have some time to think about my film and follow stop motion blogs and sites on the net everyday. I have also been thinking about new camera & lens options, how to build the set, stop motion software,. etc…

Camera: There is a big chance, I am going to be investing on Canon 40D and Nikon 55mm and 28mm lenses. We have been ( me and my husband ) checking out different places to buy these. Lets see if we can get a good deal for all.. I will post here about why I prefer this setting later. (EDIT on March 16th: I have decided to invest on Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ50 instead of Canon+Nikon set. I will post details later.)

Set: We dont have a basement in our house. So, I need to arrange things here to make a bigger place for the set. I think we will just split the room we work with a curtain to have a separate place for the set. Ohh our baby girl and cat. Need to find a way to keep them away from the set while I am shooting.

Stop Motion Software: AnimatorHD Personal. I think this is the software I will go with. Again, I will post details later.

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Custom ball and socket armature for Adem

I placed an order for a custom ball and socket armature for Adem. It has been an hard decision to make…

For me stop motion is a real art form. I do not expect to make money out of it. This is not my “job” instead this is my “art” that I am learning step by step. So, at first, it did not sound right to me to order an armature. I should have done everything in my hands.

Here you can read how I decided to have someone else make the armature for me.

So, the choices were;
1-using the puppet with wire armature I made,
2-trying to build a ball and socket armature on my own,
3-buying one of those ready-made kits and modifying.
4-ordering a custom ball and socket armature

Let me explain… This is my first stop motion film. So, experimenting everything. Two steps forward, one step backwards.. Learning, learning.. I first started with building a wire armature for Adem. Using wire and epoxy putty for the armature, covering with foam to give a body form and sewing some clothes. Hands made out of silicone and the head made out of super sculpey. Before I finished the final Adem puppet you see under “Attempts”; I tried couple different wire armatures, different wires, epoxy putties,.. different clothing, couple different heads with sculpey.. So, after all, I did some animation tests. Those were okey but not as good as I expected…

I am not after a super cool, “successful” animation here. But, I want to get a little smoother movement on the set. Regarding the smooth movement; I like to leave the feeling of stop motion on the puppets when animated (you know that little interval in between each frame telling the audience that -hey I am being animated here frame by frame and someone here working hard with her heart to make me alive…) But at the same time I don’t want to get a mechanic look. I believe that each puppet has its own spirit and sometimes the spirit needs to be released to be free without considering the restrictions of being inside a puppet. This is how I approach stop motion as an art form.

Back to the stop motion armature… Many pros are out there working with puppets made out of wire armatures. They get great results. It is about experience, knowledge and of course talent! I also have a bird character: kush and I am going to be making a wire armature and animating with that. It is going to be another long process, many attempts… I may try making my own wire, ball and socket mixture armature. but for Adem as a main character of my film; I do not want to ruin my animation because of the problems of wire armature I made.

So, second choice was trying to build a ball and socket armature on my own… Yeah, it could be done if I had the machinery and equipment or I could have tried with some ready made parts. This is whole another process. I imagine how much time I would have spent on trying to build good working ball and socket armature. I will DEFINITELY try for the next project. But not for this one. There are many other things I need to learn. Also, when I try making my own ball and socket armature; I will have a good one in my hand as a reference. (Hey, shhhh.. I have not hold any stop motion armature before. The only one I saw is the one with wire armature I made.)

Why didn’t I prefer buying one of those ready-made armature kits?

animationsupplies.net armature

There are many companies selling ball and socket armature kits in many different sizes and quality. Naming couple: Skeletoon, Armaverse, AnimationSupplies. These are the ones seem better among with many others. You buy one from them; modify as much as you can: change proportions, fix joints (change a double ball joint to a one ball joint where it is need such as in the arms..) Price range is $100-$400 depending on the brand, size, type. You can find more expensive ones or even cheaper ones. I have never used one of those. I read many forum posts of the people who purchased these kits on different sites. As far as I have seen the material used and the design may cause some problems. I was not convinced about those kits being worth the money. If you are trying to decide, you can also read the news-byte-commentary about Armature Kits at Stop Motion Works.

I decided to order a custom armature spending some of the money I left for expenses such as buying lights, stopmo software,… Using a good armature will add a lot to the film I will be shooting. So, it is all about your priority.

If you are a newbie, be sure to start with making a wire armature. Then go further with a ball and socket armature, either buy an armature kit, try making your own or purchase a custom armature… This is a suggestion from someone who is new to stop motion but taking it very seriously..

meet adem and kush

These are the characters of my stop motion short. Meet ?? Nope, not yet. But for now, let me give you some information about the characters:

Adem: The name “adem” is the turkish word for “adam” He is an human being slave of the chronos.

Kush: The bird that lives on top of the Tree Of Life. The name “kush” comes from the word “kus” which means “bird” in Turkish..

Stop Motion Set Piece: Zodiac… completed!

I have completed one of the stop motion set pieces; zodiac part. I made these out of insulation foam. For the above test pics, I added some moss around. When I put the whole set together, I will add dirt all around besides carefully placed mosses, some dead brances and maybe some roots coming from the tree of life.

Process is pretty much the same with previous making of the stairs. Only difference is that I used regular wood glue instead of foam glue. I carved those zodiac symbols over the insulation foam so, I did not want to loose details with thick foam glue. On the left top, the test stone I made before starting the whole process. On the left bottom; me with respirator… I like using it but one problem… if your nose itches, you have to take out gloves swamped with paint and then take out the respirator to reach your nose… 🙂

This is what happens when you have a 2 yearsold curious girl… -hey mum, I want to draw too.. – dad take my picture 🙂 She also helped me to paint one of the pieces in white acrylic this time!.

stairs and clock face

Stairs and clock face together….

clock face with numerals

Using insulaton foam again. Nice, soft enough to cut and hard enough to sand…

You see white boxes on the left top pic above. Those are the boxes of our lunch 🙂 Those made very nice numerals…

After cutting, sanding and glueing process is done, I covered whole thing with foam glue and left it dry.  Base layer of painting was dark brown. I then applied blue antique powder paint leaving the highest spots cleaner. The last step was adding european gold wax metalic finish. Just small amounts to the highest spots while rubbing with my finger and a piece of soft fabric. Result…

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painting stones -4 … stairs again

Last week I bought some new paints and a nice decorative painting book. I was not totally happy with the previous result and wanted to give another try. Especially the texture bothered me a lot. So, this time I used pink insulation foam.

cutting out stairs

The process is pretty much the same as before. Because the insulation foam is harder, I was able to use a sandpaper to shape the edges.

painting stones

I fisrt covered the whole piece with foam glue. I then painted with white acrylic paint. After white is totally dry, here is what I did: I mixed “black colored relief paste” with “wooden furniture polish” 50% paste and 50% polish. The furniture polish I put is the one has been sitting on the shelf in our house for 3 years. It has a lot of wax and resin inside. I painted the whole thing with this mixture and right after painting (before it is dry) I rub all around the piece with a soft fabric. Where I needed lighter spots; I rubbed more and where I needed very dark spots; I did not touch. Here is the result:

It looks too clean but I will add moss, dirt, broken stones (which are also ready) when I put everything together on the set.

Note: I have my respirator Shelley 🙂 I bhought one and using. I will post the pic next time I use….