The birth of the lobster

Friday 26th of June

It has been a little while I have updated this blog, but it doesn't mean I haven't been busy.

In fact, I have all finished all my puppets and the filming of them, and now I am in the stage of editing the movie. But then I realized I never showed the finished lobster.

After making all its part it was all about putting it together,

To put it together I covered the top of the body and the tail with craft tape to hold them together. I attached the legs, gave up quickly on them moving with springs, so used a lot of hot glue. I attached the handle with hot glue and the head could just fit in with the ball joint mechanism. To make sure the places where I had used hot glue were paintable, I covered them using tissue and PVA glue. The pincers, I attached them using string, and putting the little tubes I had made to create the arms. I had a go at balancing the two claws, but decided to paint the lobster first.

Here are some details of the head, and the lobster put together.

I went outside to paint the lobster, and prime it. I did not have many options for trimming except a white pot of paint for house walls. I figured that would be strong enough.

I then let it dry for an hour, hoping it would not rain that afternoon. Then started rendering, using different shades of blue, yellow and white spots and orange highlights.

These are the few images I used as reference when rendering the lobster.

I was starting to really see it come to life and it was very exciting. Once the main blue color was set and its shades of white, I glossed it using a mix of clear nail polish and once I ran out of that I used a shiny gloss for the house. The result was quite satisfying.

The final touch was to add the claw mechanism. I wanted to do a marionette style way to the claws, so I tried different attachment methods, but quickly realized it needed more than one point of attachment for balance purposes. So I created three entry points for some thread on each claw and played around with length. This part was quite tedious. But once I finished I was so happy.

Once it was done I could finally film it ! I found out it was harder than the butterflies or the woodlouse as it is a chunkier puppet, but it ended up looking quite nice !

Here is an example of the lobster in front of the green screen :

Here is an example of the first draft of editing :