I’ve been helping with a graduate stop motion film from NFTS. It’s about a Biscuit factory.

At the moment we’re still doing the sets and props. I was asked to do a robot crane, that picks a biscuit from a conveyor belt, dips it in a river of tea and then puts in a testing table. I was initially given this:

The crane consisted initially of a polystyrene ball covered in wall filler, with a base of the same filler and a hole were you can put the arm made of twisted wires.

After some discussion, the design and colour palette was agreed. Firstly it was sanded. The base was not sanded much as it was always considered by me and my husband a weak point (too narrow), but the director didn’t want to make it wider. I avoided to sand it too much as the filler layer was too thin, in some small areas with sanding I reached the polystyrene which then I had to seal with more paint. Had to sand more after the second coat left too many deep brush marks.

One of the biggest challenges was that a round surface is much harder to stick things to than a flat one. I think this was one of the hardest things to build in the set because of that. The wire shapes for decoration needed some filler to fill gaps between the wires and the surface, slightly changing the design.

After the wire decoration (“piping”) was sorted, did the painting in other areas with other colours. Then sculpted the pointer of the dial in milliput, stick a round headed pin to it and let it set.

At that time my husband, that had helped me with the piping decoration and proposed design too, had covered the arms in heat shrink as suggested by the director and managed to put a claw in the end tested to be capable to hold a 5p coin (size of the biscuits in the factory). I had put an initial coat of paint on it:

With the pointer dry, I painted it bronze colour and let it dry. Then I went to sculpt the dial in milliput. I chose milliput as before it hardens completely it’s sticky and it can be sculpted, helping to do a dial that had to be fixed to a curved surface. The dial blue middle was the hardest bit to sculpt, when I managed to get the right shape and size the milliput was just starting to harden up! Didn’t leave me much time to smooth the surface, so when it completely dried I had to sand it more than I really wanted to.

It’s had to do sanding in thin surfaces, you have to go slowly so you don’t get through them.

Painting the dial was not that easy either as the sanded milliput seemed harder to have the paint stuck to it. These colours I made mixing acrylic paint for canvas. Didin’t see a point in buying relatively big pots of sample wall paint from B&Q for such small areas. Choosing the colours there isn’t easy either. The bronze I had to mix that way too as nobody sells bronze paint for walls (yet).

After that I had to insert the arms in the crane, fix them with milliput, create some nobs to hide the holes in the sphere and finish painting it.

The arms couldn’t be properly fixed with milliput. I made a mistake of moving the crane before this was set to try the varnish in the back, but to be honest maybe I needed polyglue to fix the arms to the polystyrene. That created the problem that the arms couldn’t at first hold many positions to be animated in stop frame. My husband sorted that putting some wood sticks in the hole of the sphere to fix the arms.

Other issue was that the base had a crack line all round as something seemed to be moving inside it when the crane was being moved around for the work. We tried to fill it and paint it more than once to sort it, but it didn’t work. Luckily it doesn’t appear in the camera positions it will be shot, and hopefully it should be sorted when it will be pinned to the set floor.

After the varnishing to a satin finish and sorting the arms, the crane looks like this:

We delivered it to Beaconsfield last Monday evening and hope it will be OK. Waiting for more instructions and preparing the expenses claim.