Had a really amazing time talking to SCAD Alumni about the making-of GDT Pinocchio at #scadanimationfestival. Naomi, Jackie, and Andres - thank you for your amazing talk! Photos by @jeechjeech
@tealcicada and I were giant NERDS and popped down to Disneyland for a weekend to attend Oogie Boogie Bash! We made these equally nerdy and niche last minute costumes (we’re Disney parks construction walls) to really get into the Halloween mood 🎃
Th-Th-The-That’s all Folks!
I finished up my last day at Laika yesterday! I had a super great time over the last year and a half in the model shop. I learned a ton and made lots of new friends here, and I’m sad to leave them all. Can’t wait for y’all to see all the beautiful work being done on the next project.
I’m super excited for some time off, but, on that note, let this also be an official “Available for Work” post! I’m on the lookout for any and all art department work, including art department production work (like PA/Coordinating!). My specialty is stop motion, but I’m always open to new experiences!
To celebrate Pinocchio’s Oscar win, one last prop(s)!
I worked alongside @mckinlaymiller and @oddlybeast to create these hourglasses, which surrounded the sphinx character in the underworld. Building things to look like glass but not actually be glass is quite the process-tons of sanding, polishing, perfecting. Unfortunately, due to time and costs, we were unable to see these to the ultimate, perfect finish, and they were replaced with VFX hourglasses in the final movie. However, we still had to build out and complete every single hourglass for the movie (6 in total) for VFX to reference and for puppet interaction purposes (why you see hourglass frames with and without glasses!).
Despite not properly making it into the film, these were my most favorite prop to work on😊They didn’t make it into the movie, but these lil guys are sitting pretty in the MoMA right now.
I made some gas masks for Pinocchio too! With the help of @mckinlaymiller of course!
These guys needed an animateable filter/hose. The original face sculpt was created by @mckinlaymiller for both the child and adult sized masks (and he of course advised the whole time!). Trying to avoid some complicated molding and casting thing, I ended up vacuumforming the hose from shower pan vinyl (which we also used for the faces), which allowed the hose to be hollow and also accordion very nicely. It’s rigged with a simple wire, and together that allowed the hose to pose to whatever was needed-it could collapse too!
It was quite the challenge but I was pretty happy with how the hose ended up working out!
Here’s another fun lil prop I got to make on Pinocchio! It’s Volpe’s stopwatch!
These had removable and interchangeable fronts, which attached via magnets. Which was a bit more finicky due to the fact that the castings shrunk a bit and did not fit as good as the original build.
If I remember correctly, we needed to be able to switch out the different fronts (one with “glass” and one without) based on what was needed on set. The prop was featured extremely close up, and so the watch hands were going to be done with VFX. So, we also built options for stages- one watch without hands and one with hands. The top ring was also friction fit for some poseable action for animation.
Todays Pinocchio prop(s): some stuff I made for Sebastian J Cricket! I made the tea cup, the quill, the ink pot, and the glasses shown here. I DID NOT make the lovely books or the background stuff!
A lil part 2 to the gun I posted yesterday featuring my mechanical drawing/planning notes/crazy person sketches, a lovely side by side of both guns thanks to @brian.capati who painted the small gun with @matvey_rezanov painting the bigger gun, a video of the trigger in action thanks to @mckinlaymiller (who recommended placing foam behind the trigger for a bit of tension and bounce back), and a peek into my notebook where I keep track of when and how long I work on things (it did not take me a week to make this fyi, this is one snippet of the notebook-it took me roughly three weeks total).
Now for one of the most challenging props I came across on Pinocchio-a beretta pistol.
This one truly stumped me. I think I remember sitting at my desk for an entire day staring at this prop design trying to figure out where to even start. This prop stressed me out more than any other on Pinocchio, and again I thought-they’re gonna know I’m a model making fraud and they’re gonna let me go 😂.
When I started with this prop, it was featured a bit more heavily and was a bit more involved than what ended up in the film (as per the usual nature of model making). The gun need a few moving parts, with the top needing to slide back and forth, the trigger to go down, and a magazine needed to pull out of the gun. The trickiest part was getting the top to slide back and forth-especially since there were certain pieces-like the barrel-that needed to be static.
I started by watching a ton of gun cleaning videos, in which a beretta is fully taken apart, then put back together. I also found a handy dandy x-ray kind of drawing of the insides of a beretta. Between these two things I was able to figure out where to start and how to build this gun. And from there, I made my mechanical drawing.
One of the trickiest parts of the build (besides figuring out how to start) was getting the pieces to fit together properly. That probably took the most time to finesse.
We also needed to build two guns at different scales-one for the Podesta and one for Candlewick. Podesta’s gun looked way to big for Candlewick’s hand, so we had to make a smaller version (luckily without all the moving parts so I just sculpted it from renshape).
Like I said, eventually the gun was featured a bit less in the film than originally planned, but at the last second was included and featured more thoroughly in the scene where Mussolini orders Pinocchio to die(which I’ve included).
I think this was one of the most satisfying pieces I made on Pinocchio-and it was all done by hand! Which is maybe why it took me so long…😂
A quick, late post today from Pinocchio-A tiny toy airplane! I love seeing a prop all painted and ready for set-the last time I see it is when it’s gray and sad; the painters always bring it to life!
