2010-03-25

California Raisin refurbished


I just finished cleaning up this old California Raisin for display. Sorry for the poor quality of the photo, I'll try to take a better one and replace it. If memory serves, I built this particular puppet and animated it in the last shot of this PSA for the Public Library: Raisin Rap

That's my hand that comes down and stamps the book in the last shot. All of the Raisins for the PSA were made using existing molds from "Meet the Raisins" - this Raisin is "BeBop." Vince Backeberg fabricated all of the legs for the Raisins, I think. I also animated the shot where "Red" says "Check 'em out." Hal Hickel, Larry Bafia, Brad Johnson and the late Bruce McKean also worked on the PSA. Sir Mix-a-Lot did the music.

9 comments:

  1. That is really cool Webster, I had never even seen this ad before. He looks like he is in good shape too. Was his clay pretty hard at all? Thanks for posting this... I've gotta go check out some books, bye!

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  2. Woot - rocking raisins ! I was about... nah, that can't be, that would be too long... Really cool sculpt, and good to have them back (at least partly).
    I can slightly remember that someone found the original characters thrashed (!!!) somewhere - including some photos and that this person also rebulidt and repaired the characters as good as possible. But this is just a slight memory from about a year and a half ago otr so.

    As mentioned before - good to have them back.

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  3. Wait... What?!?! Really? I never heard of this. Where did this happen? Laika? Do you know about this Webster?

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  4. Found it ! Be strong now:

    http://www.animateclay.com/index.php?module=Pages&func=display&pageid=23

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  5. Thanks partner, I remember these. I thought you were referring to a recent story of this happening. Marc talks about these in detail on his "How to Animate" tutorial. Very cool stuff. Thanks for finding the link though.

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  6. Yeah, I sent those to Marc years ago with a bunch of other Vinton Studios "junk".

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  7. I've been thinking about the sort of challenges that shooting digitally in high definition with DSLR's poses for clay animation.

    When it was done on 35mm, it had a grain pattern that obscured minor mistakes and imperfections. With hi-def imaging, the camera shows everything. I'm actually thinking of artificially adding digital grain in post...

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  8. I would disagree. Shooting 16mm hid imperfections, but 35mm was similar to digital in that everything showed up, every little fingerprint or shiny spot, fuzz... digital is just now catching up to film and we're faced with the same problems. I mostly shot ASA100 35mm so there wasn't a lot of grain. There is a grain pattern when you're shooting with DSLR's, it can be adjusted depending on what ASA you set your DSLR to.

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  9. Good points! As you can tell, I've never shot 35mm.

    For removing shine, eye shadow applicators work, they suck the excess oil right up. Is ASA 100 comparable to ISO 100 on a DSLR?

    I didn't notice the grain pattern because it was scaled down quite a bit in the finishing res. I stand corrected, there is a lot of randomness in the pixels at their native resolution...enough to increase file size quite a bit at the higher ISO settings.

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