Yoink'd is a short movie I created for the first-ever StopMoShorts.com film festival. This was a very quick project. I spent about one day building the set and props (with Carolee's help), two days filming and animating, and a day on post-production.

The entire film was shot with a digital still camera, with plenty of resolution to encode the movie in high definition format. In retrospect, I would have composed tighter shots so that you can see the characters' expressions better in the low-res version of the movie.

For last year's Christmas name drawing, Dad asked for "something fun." So when I drew his name, I decided to make a Dad Action Figure. What could be more fun than that?

My sculpture started with an armature made of aluminum wire and plumber's epoxy. The aluminum wire provides a flexible frame to support the clay, and the epoxy constrains that frame with bone-like sections that won't bend. The feet are made of solid aluminum blocks in which I bored out threaded holes with a tap set. These specialized feet allowed me to secure the sculpture to its base.

Because I decided to include an armature for the fingers, I needed to file down the tips of the aluminum wire, as you can see in the "manicure" image to the right.

Once the armature was finished and covered with an initial blob of Sculpey Super Elasticlay to define the torso, I placed it in the oven for the initial baking. It's weird to see the silhouette of a human form inside your oven!

Then the actual sculpting began. I used Sculpey Super Flex for the rest of the sculpture, so everything would be bendable and posable. As it turned out, the cured clay was a bit stiffer than I'd anticipated, so the final figure can't be posed as well as a foam latex or regular clay sculpture, but the good news is that it's permanent, so you don't have to worry about damaging it when you handle it.

Here's Dad posing with the final sculpture. Can you see the resemblance?

These are some very short (1-2 second) stop-motion tests I did January 2003 using STIKFAS. All stop-motion frames were captured with a Canon S30 digital still camera connected to my computer with a USB cable. This allowed me to control the camera remotely, so I wouldn't have to touch the camera itself and risk ruining the shot.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to lock the camera focus using this method, so every frame the camera auto-focus kicked in, sometimes focusing on the background rather than the subject. To alleviate this problem, I placed a stationary focus target in my scene (which you can see in the third thumbnail), and set the camera to focus on that side of the frame; I then cropped each frame to remove the focus target.

For tie-downs, I drilled holes in the STIKFAS feet and pushed pins through the holes. The stage was made of cork, so I was able to hold the character in place quite nicely this way.

The first animation is clearly quite jerky. I was having difficulty posing the legs without drastically affecting the upper body, so for the other two tests I removed the upper body so I could focus just on the legs.

NOTE: These animations are very short, so you may want to set your media player to loop.