Today I’d love to share this full plasticine character that I animated for Out of Words, directed by Johan Oettinger.
I had a blast the entire time! Stop-motion animation (let alone video games!) is not using plasticine (clay, in American English) all that often and those who know me are well aware that I swear by it!
This shot is featuring one of the recurrent characters of the game who finds themselves in quite the pickle initially. There is a relatively simple armature in the character’s chest and arms (made by Wiredfly’s model-making department) because the size is really quite big to fit the size of the giant hand that was made beforehand. Of course, a bigger size means more weight – plasticine can get heavy quite fast – so in order to sustain that weight in the long and relatively thin arms, it is advised to have an armature. But other than the arm+chest armature, the character is fully plasticine. What a joy for me!
Plasticine is the only material that effortlessly puts me in the zone and nothing is a struggle, even when on the face of it, everything should be a struggle: here, the sheer size of the character, the amount of plasticine to push and pull around to model each pose, plus sculpt-through lip-sync with teeth to take out and put back in all the time, all of this with a tight deadline, I felt stressed initially but very quickly the elation and flow of modelling plasticine throughout the entire 10-second shot totally overrode everything and reminded me why I fell in love with this art and why I wanted to make it my job.
I was so privileged also to work with the Wiredfly team, because Johan, the director and Mikkel Maltesen, the Art Director, gave me free rein in the transformations of the facial elements. I had very little time but I certainly had a ton of fun!
Here is the timelapse of the shot: