A little "behind the scenes" look at the creation of an Ochre Jelly MOC!
About this creation
Introduction
Hi there! Thank you all for your kind words about my recent "Tour de Force" collection of Clone Wars figures. It was a lot of fun building them, although it turned out to be quite a project!
I've always wanted to capture my building process on film, to show how I get from concept to creation. It's a very "iterative" process, and does take some time. On average, each figure requires about 8 hours of total building time, from start to finish. Sometimes its half that. Sometimes double!
So this time around, as I spent a lazy sunny Sunday ignoring other family members and constructing Obi-Wan Kenobi, I decided to create a visual record of the process, and here is the result, complete with "director's commentary"!
The Beginning
First step is to just build a crude figure, in a simple stance, just to get the thing at the right scale. He kinda looks like medieval knight at this point! The use of yellow bricks I call "cheese sculpting". I seem to have a lot more of yellow than any other color, and a good range of bricks in that color too. So its much quicker to stay in that color and just focus on the design. It also prevents me from limiting design choices to just bricks I currently happen to have in a specific color.
Hour 1
Here's the first attempt at the stance I had in my head. Its not good - the legs are on track, but he's become left handed, and looks more like a ballet dancer with a back injury!
Hour 2
Got the stance sorted out at last. Fleshout the details of the boots and tunic bottom.
Hour 3
Now to get started on that cloak. I dread trying to recreate flowing fabrics. At this point, you can see the puffy sleeve concept already, but connected in a primitive way. The logical way to do the cloak is with lots of large vertical plates, as shown here. but it just doesn't 'flow' somehow.
Hour 4
At this point I decided to stub in the basic colors of everything except the cloak (since I don't have much brown - its all gonna have to be special-ordered). Still not liking that cloak design. The studs-up 2x4 torso is also a little primitive.
Hour 5
I completely rebuilt the torso using SNOT (Studs Not On Top) so I could create a better 'layered' effect, with a wrapped tunic held in by a hefty utility belt, and with multiple wrapped layers revealing a bit of his chest. Doing SNOT also gave me a much cleaner way to attach the arms and put them at an interesting angle.
Hour 7
The plated cloak was not working, so I started over with a brick-built version using a lot of regular and inverted slopes. You'll also notice at this point the torso was back to its old design. This is the iterative process: I thought the old torso design would be easier to hang the new brick-based cloak from.
Hour 8
More iteration: The SNOT torso is back, with some smooth tiles to create a better visual separation of the outer and inner layers of the upper tunic. I'm figuring out how the hec to attached the bricky cloak to the non-SNOT interior of the SNOT torso. Note the first (rough) appearance of 'swooshes' on the light saber!
Rear view
Here's the finished back of the cloak. I was surprised how quicky I managed to recreate the distinctive large hood. The hard part here was actually building the 'billowing tails' in a way that kept everything connected! And leaving 'just enough' room around the arm hinges without leaving gaping holes.
Head shot
The head usually gets finished last. I've given him a proper hair cut, defined the neck, and shaped the beard a bit. All that remains for the face now is to Sharpie in the eyes!
Step in to my office
This is my usual work area. No banks of drawers or basement work tables for me! Just the living room floor, by the window, in the sunlight. I simply have everything Zip-bagged by color, with a couple of 'special' bags such as the 'fiddly little things' bag over on the left there. As you can see, I also study my reference material pretty closely. For Obi-Wan, I was able to use the Star Wars Visual Dictionary. But typically I have multiple printouts of web photos of my subjects.
Where the magic happens
This is my photo area. There is a rig of halogen lamps in the ceiling for direct lighting, but diffuse lighting works better so you can see I have a couple of bulbs with reflectors diffusing off the ceiling. I prefer using the entire room to diffuse the light, rather than a 'light box' or 'light tent', since it gives me more room to work around the models. Maximum diffusion! The light level is actually quite low really - but I have a camera that works really well at this level. Note the blacked out windows!
And... action!
This is an early test shot, to figure out the optimal lighting arrangement, camera settings, and background. Note my original vision had the 'flying' droid directly to his left. However, that made it hard to get a good front-shot of all 3 figures at once. Hence in the final scene, the flying droid is slightly behind him. This was the wrong backdrop: too light and textured. I eventually went for a deep black with a glossy finish, which created nice wavy 'Sci-Fi' reflections of the lights along the back, and a watery reflection of each model right under its feet. The darker backdrop also made the models 'pop' out, and added to the illusion of the light saber 'swooshes' to convey motion.
Comments
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I like it |
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August 19, 2011 |
SHHHHEEEESHHHH |
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I made it |
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January 14, 2010 |
Your welcome! Your stuff is great too. If my "Top 9 of 09" had been a Top 10, Buzz would have made the list! |
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I like it |
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Dave and John Xandegar January 9, 2010 |
We're SO glad you did this! Johnny and I have always loved your stuff, and it's great to see how fellow builders go about it. Your technique is quite practical, and your results speak for themselves! Also...many thanks for the tLB blogs of our work. It's an honor to know you like our stuff! See ya'round the pages! D&J |
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I like it |
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July 23, 2009 |
this was so cool, and very intresting, where there B any more of those, cause i really injoyed it, btw at first i thought it was a darth vader, but then I read on :) |
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I like it |
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July 23, 2009 |
Just goes to show that this one is both artist and engineer. Now that I see more or less "how" it's done, I am even more convinced that I probably couldn't do it as well myself. |
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I like it |
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July 23, 2009 |
Hehe awesome, i like your way that you build things, i usually just start of with some sort of new building technique ive just invented and go from there :) |
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