Good thing you're not a girl CJ...

... or I might get in trouble for the cropping on these pictures ;)

Here's roughing in of CJ's chest...

I can see this area going through multiple changes because this is one spot my reference material is a little sketchy.

I have some GREAT shots of the Weta maquette, which should, in theory, be OK after reading in The Art of District 9 that the major differences between the CJ maquette and the finished CG CJ were all in the face... however some of the screen shots seem to contradict this. And then of course the problem with the screen shots is that they're often blurry and CJ's t-shirt obscures any details.

So I have no choice but to more or less follow the Weta maquette... but we'll see how happy with it I am, the further I get.

Head Games...

(Something tells me by the time I'm done this Prawn puppet I'm going to have exhausted all the creative titles involving the word 'head' :P )

So here's CJ, happily positioned back out in the middle of my newly cleaned workshop, ready to be sculpted!

You may recall I was trying to keep the sculpt at the same level of "doneness" as I worked (ie. I didn't want to completely finish off one area, like the head, while other parts were still in just-roughed-in stage).

Having roughed in CJ's basic shape I wanted to do a little more refining, so I started back at CJ's head, with the plan to work my way down.

Here you can see me roughly "sketching" in some guidelines (while standing on a stool, I should note) as I try and get both sides of the head to be the same shape.

I also started, after comparing the sculpt to the super-cute reference pic, to cautiously fill in around the eyes and bulk-up CJ's "cheek-bones" (cheek exo-skeleton?), and roughly sketch in his face-plates.

More refining and rounding off of the back of CJ's head. I used a rake tool to start and then smoothed that with a loop tool (yes, with temporary skewer-antennae).

Roughing in CJ's head ridges - you can see how I did one side and then used a mirror to see if I was getting the second ridge the right size and shape.

With both ridges roughed in.

Pleased with the progress I decided to then move onto CJ's chest next.

Sculpting To Soothe The Soul...

So I made sure I made some time for CJ yesterday. Barely an hour but it felt really good (and no more procrastination-guilt).

I mentioned in passing in my last post that I wanted to come up with a way of making sure that any further photos I took for the purpose of comparing the sculpt against the reference photos I took from the same position. This way I’d know that any differences were due changes in the sculpture, and not from seeing things from slightly different angles, etc.

So I started off the session yesterday by marking CJ’s current position on the floor of the workshop. Now, should I have to move him out of the way for something I’ll know I’ll get him back in the same spot.

Then I moved a stool back a few feet from CJ and marked its position as well (and now you can see my father’s side of the workshop...).

It was especially important to mark the stool’s position since I move/use it quite frequently. I don’t always sit on it but I do use it a lot – it’s at the exact perfect height to hold tools and a small bowl of clay so it saves me having to step back and/or having my hands full when I want to switch rapidly between two or three tools.

Anyways, with the stool on the other side of the room, I can sit on it and fit CJ in his entirety comfortably into the viewfinder of the camera. By lining his base up with the bottom corner of the screen now I know I’m taking the shots from pretty much the same place each time.

And when I don’t want to go back into the other room and run through all the trouble of taking the pic into Photoshop to compare, I’ve discovered I can do this…

Crude, yes, (it's just me holding the reference pic up in front of the camera, adjusting the distance till it and the sculpt looked the same size) but quite effective. For instance I could see yesterday that the shape of CJ’s head wasn’t quite right. It needed to be higher in the front and rounder in the back…

So I started in on rounding off and reshaping his head.

I was really having fun with it, but I stopped myself before I could get too carried away. One of the sculpting tips I received at the IMATS in Europe was to block in and refine the WHOLE general shape first before creating too much detail in one area. I’ve already gone a bit further with the head than the rest of CJ’s body than I probably should have but that’s OK – it’s letting some of his “personality” come through, and I find it more motivating to work on him now that he has a recognizable face. But I really do need to bring the rest of the sculpt up to the level of the head now, before proceeding any further.

So I removed CJ’s arms for now to have easier access to his torso, and filled in more of the back of his neck.

I think the plan for the next little bit is to work on refining his torso, then move onto the limbs before circling back to further refine his head and neck again.

Close... But No Fuel Cylinder...

Here’s a pack of Prawn podiatry pics!

*wiggles toes* And this little Prawnling went to market, and this little Prawnling stayed home… *coughs*

I mean … um, more sculpt pics. You’ll see a number of fairly major changes very quickly – something was bugging me (no pun intended) about the sculpt (mainly the head) but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what exactly. So I was trying to rough in a number of the basic forms to see if I could get my head around the problem.

I finally decided the head was too big – or at least that I should scale back and take another run at it. The result reminded me of some bizarre combo of Kermit The Frog and Brundle-Fly @_@

But that was evidently what I had needed to do because things soon started to head in a better direction… Brundle-Frog was happily starting to look more like CJ

Something was STILL bothering me about the sculpture though. I went back through all my reference material but to no avail. Besides an overwhelming feeling that something was ….off none of my pictures were helping me figure out what.

So I turned back to the Internet, on the off chance my Google-fu could unearth perhaps some new material.

And I found some! I found a near perfect pic in fact – which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse.

On an online CG magazine I found an article about District 9 – including the following CGI character sheet of CJ.

Finally! An in-focus, standing-still shot, where he didn’t have his little hands in front of his chest!
(which is adorable as far as poses go, but doesn't make for the greatest reference picture...)

And that’s when I realized what the problem was…. There was something wrong with the armature itself.

Here’s the CJ sculpt as we last saw him, followed by the side CG shot, and then the two superimposed…

Basically I'd made my CJ too straight and tall – closer to the proportions of a human than those super-curvy Prawns (that spine’s not even an ‘S’ curve – more like a double ‘M’ curve… :P )

The hips could be fixed without removing all the clay but to realign the arms into the proper position I would need to remove all the clay from the shoulders. In other words – back to square one :P

Well ... FOOK.

Step 1) Pre-Prawn-duction Pre-Production

Now to make an animatronic puppet you must first sculpt a full-sized model in clay of what you want the finished puppet to look like. So that’s what I’ve been doing so far (as well as a lot of research into puppetry and animatronics when I didn’t have time to actually get into my workshop – but more on that in the future).

First, I gathered as many pics of CJ as I could, from places like the websites for Weta Workshop, and Image Engine (the FX shops who, respectively, designed and did the CG for the movie), fansites like D9fans.com (who have a huge gallery of screen caps), and just my own copy of the District 9 DVD. These all got printed out and set up on my bulletin board like so:



Guess this makes me a member of the Prawn-parazzi eh? ;)

(Sorry – the puns are only going to get worse from here on in – I have a condition)

I found some fantastic high res photos on Weta’s site (including a nice close-up of the CJ maquette they had at their SDCC booth this year) but I soon noticed a problem. Compare that Weta maquette shot I was so excited about on the left with the screen cap of CJ from the movie on the right.

Yes, the angles are slightly different but it’s also clear that the whole front of CJ’s face is different on the maquette (for instance the area between the eyes is concave on the model and convex on the CG CJ). Meaning my lovely big, sharp, highly detailed print out was now, not useless, but less helpful than I was hoping as its accuracy to the finished on-screen CJ was suspect. ***

Well …. *insert Wikus’ favorite word here* :P

So I also took a turn playing Pablo Prawn-casso (told you…) and did a couple sets of sketches/plans, both to scale (top) and full-sized (bottom) in order to help me amalgamate the info from the various reference pics and get my head around the design better.

Did I NEED to do a full size set of plans in addition to the scale ones? Maybe not ... but as this was primarily meant to be a learning experience I figured it was good drawing practice. And they did come in handy later…

*** Note from future me: I got The Art Of District 9 for Christmas (Great book!) and they explain in the book that the facial designs changed because once Image Engine tried to animate the Weta designs they found they were having trouble getting them to emote properly. The overlapping facial plate design in the final film was meant to allow for more facial movement while retaining a very insect-like look. So it sounds like the rest of the maquette is probably screen accurate then – but of course I didn’t know that when I started the project back in the fall.***