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Photo Reference

July 1, 2008 at 7:36 am · Filed under Designs, Links

I’m trying out the beta of a neat service called Evernote, one of the features of which being the ability to record all sorts of scraps of info, be it text, audio, or imagery, and to post it in a public scrapbook. So I’m going to be saving photos of things I might be wanting to incorporate into later puppet designs, things that are visually neat, and the like, and I thought I’d share it with you. If you’re interested in seeing what piques my interest as it does, you can check out the public feed here:

http://www.evernote.com/pub/hoggworks/PuppetPhotoRef/

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Building a Better Bono

June 26, 2008 at 7:08 pm · Filed under Designs

The Bono puppet is done! I think he turned out really well, and is one of our better puppets so far. This is what he looks like:

And this is how he was built:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/inelegant/sets/72157605759679230/

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Building Bono

June 23, 2008 at 8:12 am · Filed under Designs, Links

For reasons I can’t yet get into, we’re working on a Bono puppet. We’re just about at the “putting the skin on the foam skeleton” phase, and it’s already looking cool, and the likeness is there. Makes a person feel good.

This is the design. Click on it to see the photos of the build process in Flickr:

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The Art of Wall-E.

June 19, 2008 at 5:47 am · Filed under Designs, Links

Not to turn this blog into a lesser rehash of drawn.ca, but they were kind of enough to point to the very swanky-looking art book for the upcoming Pixar movie Wall-E. The Art of Wall-E has a ton of production sketches, concept art, and the like. I consider this relevant to Hoggworks because it’s all about character design, and that’s very important when you’re creating any kind of character, from a physical item such as a figure, sculpture, or a puppet, to cartoons, CG characters, or anything else.

The book looks really nice, and in my admittedly limited experience reading “Art of” books (something I should rectify) the concept designs frequently posess an energy that the final products seem to lack (I’m looking at you, Star Wars).

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Caricatures.

June 19, 2008 at 5:34 am · Filed under Designs, Links

I’m working on a design for a new puppet (for a couple, actually), with one hopefully getting made over the weekend in an atypically rush-rush kind of manner. I’m going to see how little sleep I can manage with, how quickly I can build the thing, and how little I can skimp on the quality. This puppet — which I can not yet talk about, sadly — will be for web video only, so there’s a certain leeway there, but not terribly much, as web video today can mean anything from a 320×240 video all the way up to true 720p/1080i/1080p HD video.

The reason I’m mentioning this at all right now is because this new puppet is based on an existing person. More than that, it’s based on an incredible famous and well-known person (even moreso than Stephen Colbert). As such, I’m working off an existing visual, which is to say, this person’s actual appearance. Which is to say … I’m making a caricature of him. Now, in some ways, many of the dotBoom puppets, based loosely on real people (who have largely forgiven me), were all caricatures, but that seems like a bit of a stretch, to be honest. And with the Stephen Colbert puppet, there was the attempt to make it look very much like Colbert, and despite the fact that you need to caricature because you need to pick out and exaggerate the key features so that it makes the resemblance between puppet and person completely obvious, it was and it is a very good-natured endeavor.

This new puppet, though? It’s a shot across the bow. It’s a project I’m doing with a friend of mine, and while some other people he talks about, and some other people we nearly lampooned, are people that he and I like, I have no personal feelings toward this person, and my friend somewhat actively dislikes him. There are apparently good reasons for this, but I’ve never put that much thought into it. Now, before anyone wonders or worries: no, this isn’t a simple attack piece. I’d never do this. There’s a good angle on what we’re doing, and, as with most of the stuff I do, it’s funny. It’ll be a good gag, simple as that. When it’s done I think it’ll be pretty great — my friend’s writing the script, and he’s very funny, and I’ll be doing the puppet-building and puppetry, with the possible help of my friend Nicholas Lemon — so there’s no worry to be had about my suddenly going all-attack, and no-wit.

Back to the caricature: I spent a chunk of yesterday working on the design for this new puppet, figuring out the physical elements to highlight and accentuate, and what aspects of the puppet’s caricature they would be representative of. I think I’ve got a good design done, which will look like the person it’s supposed to, and also be exaggerated in all the right ways. If the build goes as planned (assuming nothing falls through) I should be starting on it tomorrow afternoon, and in theory I should have photos of the design and puppet progress up in the next few days.

Part of the reason I mentioned this at all, aside from a desire to update this blog more frequently, and get back to that “pulling back the curtain” kind of thing, is because I came across this very cool designer’s site (via drawn.ca), and I wanted to pass along the link. His name is Kyle T. Webster, and his work is great. He does some nice logo work, and illustration, but I mention him here because he does dynamite caricature work. You should definitely check him out.

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