To celebrate Valentines Day, we’ve added some new desktop wallpapers to the Downloads page. Check out Zero as he puts on the moves and courts the lovable She-Zero.

Every year Flickerfest curates a programme of Australian short films from the festival to screen with an Australian feature film at the London Australia Film Festival. Zero was one of these shorts.

Now in its 16th year, the festival is an eagerly awaited annual landmark on the UK film calendar. Since March 1994, every major Australian feature film has been screened at the festival.

The 16th LAFF opens on Thursday 18 March with the UK premiere of Rachel Ward’s award-winning Beautiful Kate. Zero will be screened on 21st March before The Marriage of Figaro. Ticket and venue info can be found here.

Each year, Flickerfest selects a specially curated programme from their Australian short films in competition and goes on a National Tour called The Best Of Australian Shorts. It will be screening at selected venues around the countries 23 touring locations, from Jan to March.

Zero is amongst the nine films selected and screens first in the programme. Click here to find out when and where you can catch Zero on the big screen.

We are very proud to announce that Zero picked up the award for ‘Best Achievement in Sound’ at the Flickerfest 2010 short film festival.

This was made possible thanks to the exceptional work of the film’s sound designer Brendan O’Brien who did a remarkable job producing the atmosphere, sound effects and final mix. Congratulations on an award well deserved.

I’d also like to thank composer Kyls Burtland whose beautiful and enchanting score also played an integral role in the sound design.

Once our characters were cast in silicone, the next step in the process was to add the final finishes to the puppets, a process more commonly referred to as fabrication.

There were 3 main areas to contend with:

• Body and head wrapping
• Hair creation
• Accessories – numbers, eyes, eyebrows

Body Wrapping

Based on the class system world we had created, zero’s had mottled brown and white cotton with knots and criss-crossed threads. Ones through to nines were pink and as you move up the class system the top layer of criss-crossing thread diminished with nines being of pure thread.

All characters were wrapped with 4 ply cotton, which was just the right texture and size for all those macro shots. (the empty cardboard spools also made great puppet stands!) As you can see by the photos, each character was individually wrapped row by row around and around for months and months! It was quite meditative and I spent a lot of time with my buddies Oprah and Deepak and watched way too many conspiracy docos online!

For the wool to adhere to the silicone puppet, we had to stick it down using more silicone. The basic rule of thumb is that nothing sticks to silicone… but silicone. We used Elastosil tube silicone, the smell of which I became quite accustomed …hmm looking back perhaps I spent far too much time alone, with glue and little string people. These tubes cost $40 each so I experimented using cheap silicone alternatives from the local hardware shop but the smell was toxic (like chemical foot odour) and the adherence was poor – so quality ruled price. My tools of the trade were large teddy bear sewing needles that allowed me to apply the silicone and manipulate the wool. I also went through a number of small scissors for precision cutting and to snip in awkward places.

I had a wrapping system – first the chest like a vest, then the arms and gusset and then the entire body. In large areas I wrapped with 4 pieces of wool at a time. It was important not to make certain areas too bulky (like the armpits) as it would limit the puppet’s movement. The silicone was also easier to use when it was freshly laid. I also had to be careful not to get silicone on the exterior material surface as we did not want the shiny finish of silicone to show up in the final photography.

We used foam balls for the heads, however the silicone caused them to dissolve. I conducted a range of glue tests with what seemed like every adhesive known to man kind. Spray adhesive worked best on the foam but was incredibly tacky, it was quite tricky not getting the glue all over my fingers on the cotton.

Worse memory – wrapping Zero! Zero needed to have multiple stunt doubles. As the star of the show we had to make sure that should he take a hit and break a limb mid-shot, there was an identical body double ready to step in. It was crucial that the doubles matched the colour patterns, knot positions and crossed threads of the original so any replacements were seamless. I ended up wrapping 6 identical Zero’s. Crazy, crazy times.

Hair Creation

For the character’s hair we used a thicker cotton ply than the bodies. I started by creating what can best be described as weaves for the heads. One piece of cotton with approximately 15 x 7cm threads slip knotted to it. Each head required 4- 5 weaves to create a hairstyle. It was quite a production line (albeit just me) and I must have made about 150 weaves altogether. My fingers often lost circulation as I pulled hard to ensure the slip nots would remain tight!

Weaves were then attached to heads with standard sewing pins as the hairstyle was determined. Hair cuts were given and the weaves were then glued down and held firm with the sewing pins until dry. Once adhered, the hair was covered with Craft Smart Fabric Stiffener which was used to hold the hair firm during the shoot. The Fabric Stiffener was excellent as it dried matte and therefore had no shine under the studio lights.

We outsourced a number of the hairstyles to Reina McAndrew, who drew the gorgeous illustrations shown. She came back with some hilarious contributions such as the balding man, the Farrah flick and the Afro child.

Reina also created the She-Zero hairstyle with plaits woven with straw and string as per these preliminary photo’s. The creative vision of She-Zero was for her to look like she slept in a garbage can yet be as cute as a button. We decided that She-Zero needed hair that would not move, period, as she was in a large part of the film. A few more straw weaves and plaits were added plus we cut her hair into a pixie bob with a funky jagged fringe, stuck it down and She-Zero was born.

Accessories

Numbers
Christopher Kezelos the Director and Brett Bimson our Production Designer sorted through hundreds, if not thousands of font styles looking for the perfect combination of curve and readability to match our fairytale world.

Because heads and bodies would be interchangeable, the numbers also needed to be removable. The challenge was how to fasten numbers securely onto fabric yet remove them easily with no damage to the cotton surface. We toyed with the ideas of having embroidered number badges or even making them ourselves out of cotton threads (like the Zero logo). We settled on using a laser cutter to cut numbers out of a range of fabrics such as felt and velvet. We ironed on fabric liner to create some stiffness in the material and to avoid the laser cutter frying the edges. The velvet numbers looked best on camera. After some tests , a simple glue stick (for paper) enabled us to adhere and remove numbers easily with no damage.

Eyes
We trawled the shopping aisles of Spotlight and Lincraft (Australian fabric and crafts stores) and online craft stores looking for the perfect eyes. In the end it was the proportional aesthetics which helped us decide, black drawing pins for the pink child characters, small black glass beaded teddy bear eyes for adult pink character and larger black plastic teddy bear eyes for the zeros. All eyes were easily wedged into the foam heads and held by wood glue if stubborn.

Eyebrows
Boy this part was fun…not! My mission was the creation of 50 eyebrows that had to be animatable yet rigid. We thought about plasticine, felt brows on Vaseline, compositing the eyebrows in post and even no eyebrows! The latter was lazy, eyebrows added much needed emotion to our characters. Compositing was far too timely and expensive and the other options once again would damage the material surface of the puppets.

The solution? I cut out 2cm long bits of cotton thread, unravelled them a little and placed a headless pin in the middle. I secured the pin with super glue and then re-twisted the thread with more super glue whilst moulding a gentle curve with my fingers. Super glue is the worst on fingers; I lost a lot of skin during this process and wish I had known about this technique for removing super glue sooner! Once dry, I snipped the brows into shape.

The finished eyebrows were pushed into the foam ball heads where the animators rotated them using either tweezers or their fingers, giving the characters various expressions.

I’ve included a gallery below with some more fabrication photos. If you have any questions. please leave them in the comments.

Go behind the scenes and check out the making of Zero. From concept illustrations through to principal photography, this video covers two years of production.

Music by Massive Attack, ‘Teardrop’. Purchase the song on iTunes.

Hot on the heels of winning Gold at the Australian Cinematography Awards, Zero has been selected for the 2010 Flickerfest International Short Film Festival.

Flickerfest is Australia’s leading and only Academy® Accredited international short film festival.

“With a record of over 1500 entries received from around the globe this year, Flickerfest continues to attract the latest in cutting edge and award-winning shorts from the world’s most exciting new filmmakers”, said Festival Director, Bronwyn Kidd. “This guarantees that the festival presents our Australian audiences with a short film competition amongst the best in the world.”

Flickerfest kicks off on Friday 8th January at Bondi Beach and closes on Sunday 17th of January. You can watch Zero at the following times:

• Monday, January 11, 2010 at 9.00pm
• Repeated On: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 at 4.30pm

Not in Sydney? No problem, Zero has also been selected to screen in Flickerfest’s Best of Australian Shorts. This comprises of short-listed films from the ‘Australian Shorts’ program that will tour to 10 different regional areas in Australia.

Visit the Flickerfest website for more details including programme and ticket information.

We’re excited to announce that Zero has received a NSW Gold Award from the Australian Cinematographers Society in the Experimental and Specialised category.

This is a testament to the exceptional work of the film’s Director of Photography Matthew Horrex.

The 2009 NSW/ACT State Awards for Cinematography were held on Saturday 28 November at The Menzies Hotel in Sydney.

Zero will go on to compete in the National Awards for Cinematography in May 2010.

Allow me to introduce you to the glorious world of Silicone. The material we used to surround the wire armatures and give our puppets body. So where do I start? Shore strength? Viscosity? Cure time? Ratios? If you’re a beginner like I was before dealing with this stuff, it can all seem a little overwhelming.

I started my education in Barnes where the assistant guided me through the various types of Silicone. They ranged from flesh-like consistency for prosthetics, to hard rubbers. Fortunately they had samples of each one that allowed me to pick them up and bend them back and forth. I was looking for something that would allow me to bend the underlying armature in our puppets into a position and not have a tense silicone slowly move it back into place. I chose a product called Soft Translucent Silicone which was quite bendy yet still rigid enough for me to handle on not squish between my fingers. Here’s some technical product info:

Soft Translucent Silicone is a high strength, two component, tin catalysed, translucent RTV silicone rubber. It can be intrinsically pigmented which makes it ideal for the SFX industry. This silicone has a very low viscosity combined with a long pot life and accurate detail reproduction. When diluted with up to 30% silicone diluent, it will produce a floppy “skin like” feel.

Typical Product Use

• Skins for robotic and animatronic figures displayed in permanent or travelling expositions SFX skins and props for the film industry
• Theme park props and reproduction molds
• Very flexible general purpose molds

The tricky thing about dealing with Silicone is that it comes in two parts and must be mixed in a very specific ratio. The shop assistance put the fear of God in me by warning that if I get it only a few mills wrong, the silicone wouldn’t set. I ran out and got a decent kitchen scale that would allow me to accurately measure the proportions. After working with the product for a while I realised she was being a little over dramatic.

The other ingredient we used was a silicone diluent. This effectively makes the silicone softer and we used a ratio of 10% in our mixture.

Now, down to the nitty-gritty. With the wire armature securely in place, we painted each face of the open mold with Vaseline before we closed the two sides together. This would ensure that after the silicone set, the two sides would easily come apart. If we forgot to do this step, it was often very difficult separating the mold, sometimes breaking them in half! This happened for our mold of Zero. I had to Araldite the broken mold back together which thankfully saved the day.

We often ran clay around the perimeter of the molds to ensure silicone didn’t seep out the edges.

With the silicone all mixed up, we simply poured it into the pour hole we made earlier in the mold. It really helps to have a funnel because the silicone is quite thick in its final consistency and will spill out over the sides if you try and pour too fast.

Once set, I carefully pried each side apart with a screw driver or butter knife (depending on the strength and shape of the mold).

And simply plucked out the finished cast.

Because we would later wrap our casts in wool, we wanted to ensure the silicone was the same colour as the wool. This was to ensure that if a character was posed into a position that revealed the silicone between the strands of wool, you wouldn’t be able to notice it.

To do this, we added a pigment to our mixture designed specifically for silicone. The Zero character only required a white base, but the other characters required a pink base to match their wool. Christine always managed to mix together the perfect consistency of red and white.

Now that the sculptures had been cast, it was time to move into fabrication. Stay tuned for our next post and feel free to ask any questions about the above process in the comments.

When brainstorming how best to build our characters, I drew inspiration from one of my favourite childhood toys… the Pink Panther. Many of you may be familiar with this type of bendy rubber toy which allows you to pose the character into any position and it retains its shape. This was due to what lay at its core, a wire armature.

Traditionally, an armature is a framework around which a sculpture is built. This framework provides structure and stability, especially when material such as clay is being used as the medium. When sculpting a figure, the armature is analogous to the skeleton and has essentially the same purpose: to hold the body erect. An example of this can be seen in my previous post on Sculpting Prototypes, however the armatures used in our final puppets served a different purpose… to bring our characters to life!

We used a special wire made specifically for stop motion animation designed to bend back and forth hundreds of times before breaking point. It comes in various thicknesses and can be purchased from speciality hobby shops such as Barnes.

As with all our phases of pre-production, we performed numerous tests and discovered through trial and error the best approach for building our armatures. In our case, a body could be made up of 3 pieces of wire. One for the left arm and leg, another for the right arm and leg and the third for the neck and spine.

They were glued together with quick drying super glue, then tied at the chest and hips with regular wire. The arms were bent at the ends to create round edges. This helps avoid the pointy wire from popping out of the arm whilst animating.

Next we applied a great product called Knead-It to the chest and hips ensuring the connecting joints were all stuck together tightly. We also added some to the end of the arms to give them a little more body and to the feet to secure the nuts in place (more on this below). This product is a two-part epoxy that has a working time of 3 – 5 minutes once mixed and dries like concrete 10 minutes later. After an hour, it can even be sanded, drilled, machined, filed, sawed or painted. You simply mix it together in your hands (gloves recommended) and it has the consistency of BluTack. We used it everywhere during our production.

The photo below also shows an alternative approach to creating armatures. In this example the arms and legs were made from two pieces of wire wrapped around each other. This actually gives the armature more strength and may allow you to keep animating if one of the wires should break mid shot. For our purposes however, I found that because the whole puppet was then set in silicon, the tension became two high and I was unable to gain the same level of minute movements I could get from a single wire. Doubling the amount of wire also doubled the expense.

The feet were the most technically challenging part of the armature as they needed to include ‘tie-downs’. A tie-down is the mechanism used to fasten your puppet’s feet to the set allowing them to stand upright and stay securely in place. The most common practice is to use nuts and bolts, an examples of which can be seen in this post.

We created wire loops for the feet and super glued nuts on top. This meant that when the bolt passed through the bottom of the set and into the nut, it would pull the wire loop between them down. Knead-it was then used to keep the whole rig secure.

In some instances, we also experimented with making the wire loop up and over the nut. This was by far the most secure method to ensure the nut didn’t break free, but was a bit bulky and hard to set within our puppet. We ended up sticking with basic loops at the bottom.

If you don’t want to go through the trouble of building your own armature, you can purchase them ready made. Some are available as wire like ours, but you may opt for a more durable (and expensive) ‘ball and socket‘ joint armature. The only problem is you generally have to base your character around these predefined shapes and sizes.

Once our armature was complete, we then had to place them in the molds we made earlier. We needed to find a way to suspend the armature exactly half way between both sides of the mold so it set in the middle of the puppet once we poured the silicone. For this, I placed some wire in the grooves I had previously set in the mold and balanced the armature on these. This allowed for it to be propped up off one side of the mold. In order to ensure the armature stayed perfectly in place once I closed both sides of the mold, I stuck it to the wire in the grooves with super glue. The wire was easily removed later on by yanking it free with pliers. The process wasn’t perfect and sometimes resulted in crookedly set armatures with wires protruding from limbs, but overall, we managed to get the job done.

The next step was to close the mold and pour in the silicone to create the final cast, which I’ll write about in my next post. If you have any questions about the above process, feel free to ask them in the comments below.