BRS★Puppets Finished!

Alright folks, i have been very lazy and bad at updating the blog, but instead you will get loads of goods all at once. first of there have also been delays on the puppets, but finally Both are done. first, Black Rock Shooter herself, and secondly her Enemy for this project.

So first of, here is pics of the finished BRS

And now to proudly annaunce XNFE, the enemy that BRS will fight of in this animated fan-short!. now this puppet was most custom work yet!, loads of sculpts and casts that had to be made. the "ears" and arms are cast in resin parts.

BRS and XNFE together

And here are finally a few WIP shots of the progress of XNFE. master sculpt for arms and ears was made in wood, and sanded and epoxy-sprayed to be smooth enough. then moulded in silicone, to later be cast in resin. bubbles on the casts was filled and sanded using Liquid Green Stuff, a good hobby epoxy filler from games workshop. bubbles was unavoidable with such complicated shapes on the components. the arms where assembled by drilling holes and glue in wires. Hood got it's volume by having foam underneath, the picture clearly shows that.

 And not to forget some still not showed WIPs of BRS too. tHe skin cast went well, for both XNFE and BRS. and there wsa some custom parts here too, i made the boot zippers and the belt strap in plasticard (plastic sheet) and painted it. for the zippers i carved texture in it too. the coat zipper are a actual small zipper i found in a store, but i had to paint it myself to be silver. otherwise it contained a lot of fabric cutting, sewing and gluing.

 

That's it for now folks!, next time i will be back with the progress of the Sets for this Animation. until then, take care!.

BRS★Mould and Body Cast

Yo!, i'm back after the last failure and this time i went with the safer method of using Plaster to mould the body sculpt. luckily enough the sculpt even went intact after being removed from the mould!, so i can make a new try with Fiberglass just to take advantage of the intact sculpt, if that succeeds i can enjoy a secondary, more sturdy mould.

 the plaster cast filled over the sculpt. its done in two halves just like the fiberglass attempt was. and its also important here to add release agent to the plaster half before pouring the second half into the mould.

Here are the mould with brushed on latex. the latex is mixed with acrylic paint, the same tone i used to paint BRS's head. once the latex are a few layers thick, i brushed on alot of thick layers around the edge before putting the puppet's Foam body into it and pressing it together. for more about carved foam bodies, check my Project: Valkyria blog

I'll be back with the result of this cast once the latex dries :)

BRS★FAILED Body Mould

Yo everyone. Things didn't go too well with the body mould, so now i have to re-sculpt the body again. but i'll show you the process the mould went through anyhow. i also have some other progress to show!.

 to make a mould for latex casting it need to be done in a hard material like Fiberglass or Plaster, plaster being the easiest to use, and Fiberglas being the more risky (which i tried). fiberglass can be worth it for enhanced durability. in any case, first of you need to build up walls and stuff with a softer clay than the one you used for the sculpt. the sculpt need to be a none-hard clay aswell in order to not get stuck in the moulding material!. sculpt up carefully around the sculpture, in order to cover up one half of it. after you pour the moulding material into the mould, you will get the first half. after that simply remove the sift clay and touch up any demage to the other side of the sculpt (if any), build new walls and fill the other half. NOTE that it's important to brush on release agent when casting the second half!, you don't want the mould stuck. Vaseline works as a good release agent for both plaster and fiberglass.

 So, onto my disaster. i probably had too much hardening agent or a too thick layer of polyester resin. it got too hot during the chemical reaction and it caused the clay to almost boil, so unless i want to cast a deceased girl i'd better avoid this mould. BRS turned into Burnt★Rock Shooter.

 Recovery, i have almost sculpted up the new one already and it's ready for smoothing shortly. It's always easier to do something quicker the second time as i'm aware how to do it. in a way i'm glad it failed as i'm more pleased with the new sculpt so far. this sculpture was done on the secondary Armature (for BRS's foe).

 The Rock Cannon also had a little progress, i'm nearly done using epoxy spray and sanding to smooth it up a bit. a few more layers and some more detail added and it'll be ready for painting!.

And to round up today's post i added a little teaser pic of the second character in this project, who is also Black Rock Shooter's enemy in this film. all you can see is her eyes, no hair or anything, so keep guessing!.

That's it for this time, and to note i'm doing my next mould in plaster to not fail, and do more tests on fiberglas before i sacrifice a sculpt again, i don't want another delay on this project :)

BRS★WIP Rock Cannon and Body Sculpture progress

Yo everyone, i'm back with some progress at last. it have been a busy time since the last post and i have not been able to do as much as i wanted, but i have started smoothing the torso of the sculpt, and i hope to have it finished within a few days. I did also take ab reak and started on the rock Cannon.

 Overview of the workspace!, all this junk will become a rock cannon!

 The sculpt as it stands right now, ther eare more smoothing to be done, and the legs are not smoothed at all yet, i start upwards and down.

The WIP Cannon. its made from varied bits such as cardboard tube, wood and empty paint pots from games workshop. games Workshop's new Liquid Green Stuff are a gift from heaven, it's such a useful tool as filler when there is gaps, i brushed it on almost all over the cardboard areas to make it more sturdy, and to smooth it out with sandpaper to remove the cardboard feel. the inside of the barrel are done using a paint pot lid, and si is the mid-section of the cannon, and there is also wooden parts.

That's it for today but i hope to be back more often with updates now, as everything starts to shape up and i might finally have some more time, stay tuned everyone!.

BRS★WIP Body Sculpture

here is a pic of the WIP body sculpture. this is still far from done but it's a good base sculpt. it will have carefully refined proportions and alot of smoothing. this will later be made into a body-mould n order to cast latex skin for BRS and other characters with a similar body type, so it will be a useful mould for future puppets too.

BRS★First Progress

Alright folks, some progress!, to begin from the start; the drawing is drawn in the actual scale of the puppet on a A3 paper, so the puppet will stand roughly 13" high and are somewhere between 1/4 and 1/5 scale. 

The armature are made from aluminium wire which are bendable in order to animate the puppet, they are wired together to get a stronger armature. there are bolts in her feet, sealed with epoxy putty, in order to drill holes in the set and fix the feet to the ground with screws. there is also a square profile in her back, its fixed by the epoxy above her legs (but its not visible from the front), this will allow me to fix a thinner profile into her back, which are set on a rig. the rig will allow jump/running animations.

the head are made using a head sculpt ive made for a recent project, and is cast in resin. the face is originally changeable for animating expressions but since Black Rock Shooter will be expressionless i decided to use epoxy to fill in the lines and have the face glued on, to make a more smooth and refined finish, there are also three thin wires inserted and wired together into the head, in total six wires, 3 per twintail, which is one short and one long, this in order to animate the hair. Hair are added from cutting sections from a black wig and glued on. head is not fully finished yet as it needs some final touch-ups.

Body sculpture are in the progress, this will be moulded so that i can cast on latex skin on the puppet. in the past i made the skin in fabric and brushed on latex, it looked good but was not as smooth as a cast coould be, so this is a experiment to try how to improve the finish to the puppets, so stay tuned! the pics of the sculpt will be up soon!

Welcome to BRS★EXTEND

Welcome to BRS★EXTEND. Extend as in extension, an unofficial extension of the official franchise of course.

BRS★EXTEND or BRS★E for short (even shorter) is a Stop Motion project inspired by the existing promotional short of BRS that was released with the OVA (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3Q-z0Y4nn8) with the exception that i want to further evolve this with even more detail and more action. BRS will have a foe to face this time (we saw dead master in the original but we never saw a fight), I'm not having her fight dead master though, who she will face is secret until later. instead of only a checker floor and a misty background i will also further build up some inviroments based on Huke's wonderful illustrations of BRS.

Why did i chose Stop Motion you might ask?, simply put i am a stop motion animator, but i love Anime, and i love BRS, and this is not my first "MangaMotion" project either. except doing original concepts i enjoy doing these fan-projects aswell, and this project just as any is to give some fan support and evolve as a animator and puppet builder!.

BRS★EXTEND don't have a confirmed  finishing date yet but i hope it will be ready for fans to enjoy during summer. No film runtime is set yet either, but it's not planned to be a very long film, nor have any complicated plot, expect some enjoyable action that lasts longer than the 30sec of the official promotional stop motion

the BRS puppet are in the works, aswell as her oponent, a puppet of Mato is maybe a go too, depends on what the script will contain. Pics of progress will be up shortly!

That's it for now, expect updates every now and then!