Character Designs

At first I decided on six main characters that were all part of the circus. Each one is a different animal but all of them apart from the raven would use the same type of armature as the main character that would be the mouse. The lion is the ring master and is uncharge of the circus while all the other animals just perform as part of the group.

The mouse is the main character within my narrative. He sees the circus and befriends all the other animals and is then convinced he wants to run away with them. This is the design of the armature I used to create his body with, after looking at many other armature designs on Pinterest, I eventually planned to use wire inside allowing maximum flexibility but also durability.

This was the first attempt at the mouse armature. The clay worked really well at keeping the wire together and created a solid base that would have been great for painting on top of or covering in fabric. The real issue was with the arm and leg joints. I decided to go for a more simplistic design and just made each arm and leg out of a single piece of bendable garden wire. While the wire was extremely flexible and strong, due to the thighs and calves not having any solid areas, they would bend too much making the figure look really strange and distorted. The Character was also so small that it would have been literally impossible to animate with at the frame rate I had intended. So for the next attempt I decided to make the armature bigger and use solid parts, leaving the wire for the joints.

The second attempt at the armature was the one I decided to use for my final animation. Inside uses the same gardeners wire as the previous model for the spine connecting the head and the lower body. This made it quite sturdy yet still bendy enough to pose. I then used tin foil to solidify the areas like the forearms that aren't supposed to bed, reinforcing them with glue gun glue and an added layer of wire wrapped around for security. I did this on all the limbs to help keep everything in place. Using glue rather than clay was not only a faster process, but it helped my character stay light and not topple over from being too top heavy like the clay mouse. Once the armature was finished, I started putting the felt onto the body of the mouse starting with the head and working my way down. I mostly sewed it on but there were parts that I had to glue gun onto keep it flat against the surface. Overall the armature turned out pretty well and was extremely flexible the only issue was because the legs were so thin and the feet so tiny, it struggles to stand up by itself. To combat this in my animation I tried to avoid animating the legs and if I did I would make sure that the weight of the body is not solely supported by the legs alone.

The hands were one of the most complicated parts of the whole armature building process. Each hand  took a long time to shape due to the scale and intricacy. I used five very small strands of wire and intertwined the bottom part of them to keep them together but left the top parts exposed to create fingers. For the palms of the hands I rolled up some tinfoil and glues it the strands of wire. I made several sets of hands for each character before I decided that I was no longer going to use the other characters in my animation.