Once I made the light box, here’s how I turned it into a capture stand:
I cut a square hole (5″ on each side) in one of the solid walls of the box, and cut a piece of Styrofoam of the same size from some old package.
All that was left to do was fit my web cam into the Styrofoam. This piece very conveniently had a hole in the middle that fit my web cam perfectly. Even if it didn’t, it would have been an easy job to make one. Note: the hole has to be slightly smaller than the width of the web cam, so you get a snug fit.

Here’s how it looks. It’s now ready to shoot some stop-mo with small objects, or even some cut-out animation. If you want to capture some 2D pencil tests, all you have to do is get a peg bar and tape it down at the bottom.

If you try this out, please share your results! I’d love to see them.

Planning:
I started by blocking out the walk in 2D using Flipbook. For this character, I wanted a somewhat stiff, serious attitude in the body, combined with a heavy step. Here’s the result (animated on 2s at 24 fps):



I printed out the frames from the blocking to use as reference for the shoot. There were a total of 11 drawings, which I printed on a single sheet of paper:

Shooting:
I set up a single light at a high, nearly overhead angle for a hard, film noir-like lighting scheme.
Since my poses were already planned out in Flipbook, most of the “thinking” was done. With one exception: I had forgotten to draw the tie during the blocking stage, so I improvised the overlap in the tie while shooting.
And here’s the finished walk!



As you can see, it’s not particularly smooth, and there are some camera glitches. I’ve learned a few things from this whole exercise, to use in future stop-mo efforts:

• Build a bigger puppet next time. Small puppets are harder to construct, and harder to animate smoothly.
• Lock down the camera and stage more securely.
• Keep your elbows off the table! It’s not just good manners, it’s good for stop motion! Seriously, the smallest things can affect the camera, resulting in more work to match up the frames in post.

C+C welcome!

Here’s the finished puppet!

The face still needs smoothing, which I’ll take care of at the finishing stage.

C&C welcome!

Since the feet of the armature are continuous with the legs, I had to handle the half-finished puppet while making the shoes, which meant I had to be – what’s the word – careful! What’s more, I had to sculpt them out of propoxy. Though Sculpey would have been much easier to shape and sculpt, it needs baking to harden, and that would mean a fiery (and smelly) end to his foam-and-cloth body.

And so I spent most of the weekend mixing, sculpting, sanding and trimming these shoes out of propoxy. ‘Nuff said.

When I finally got down to painting, it was finally fun! I gave a few layers of brown and black paint, trying to make the shoes look worn and scuffed at the toes and sole. I finished up with a coat of spray-on varnish. Here’s the result!

I bought some cheap scraps of different materials from the nearest fabric chain store.

For the designs, I used the puppet clothing templates graciously shared by Nick Hilligoss on his gallery. I adapted them to fit my puppet’s body shape (this took some trial and error… and error…)

Since I don’t have any sewing skills, I used regular craft glue to hold the pieces together at the seams. Works for me!

Before I could finish the shirt and collar, I had to build a bit of the neck. I mixed some plasticine to give a rather grayish dull skin color (since I want a desaturated, muted look) and built it up around the neck armature wire.

The tie has a piece of wire mesh sandwiched between two layers of cloth, so it can be shaped and animated!

Here’s a WIP image, and a pic of the finished clothes. Enjoy!