The Forest Beyond: Creating Fenley
- Noisy Neighbours
- Sep 14, 2016
- 7 min read
Hello everyone! Today is a special day for our devblog, marking the beginning of "sleepovers". We'll host from time to time articles from other game developers, presenting their works and processes.
Our friends Noisy Neighbours are our first guests ; we hope you'll find their character creation process as interesting as we do. They are currently holding a crowdfunding campaign for their first project, The Forest Beyond - don't forget to check it out!
Hi everybody!
We are Noisy Neighbours, a young animation company created by Andreas Husballe and Christophe Peladan, and we have a very exciting project to share with you guys: a STOP MOTION GAME for preschoolers, called The Forest Beyond.
As most of you already know, stop motion games are a rarity. Surely the hard core gamers among you will remember The Neverhood, the cult title from 1996, brilliant point-and-click adventure entirely animated in clay. More recently the beautiful Lumino City delighted us with it’s stunning cardboard-made environments, and a few more projects are currently in development. Still, the potential of stop motion in games is vastly overlooked, we feel, so we decided to embark on a journey to make one ourselves.
Why this choice? We’re really fond of stop motion at Noisy Neighbours and we have the expertise, and it seemed to us that we could create a game that would stand out, with real props, puppets, sets, all of it physically built and lit, animated all by hand in a traditional way. It will have a very tactile look. The imperfections of stop motion are what gives it its charm, and it taps directly into our generation’s cultural subconscious mind.
In The Forest Beyond we will follow Fenley, a blue little monster who lives in a magical forest. The place is full of other little monsters and packed with fun surprises. It’s a game of free exploration: the player drags Fenley around and finds out what happens when he clicks here or there, on that rock or on this flower... There are also many educational mini games for Fenley to encounter on his way, as The Forest Beyond is first and foremost an educational game. We are aiming at creating a world teeming with life and charming interactions with the all local creatures that Fenley will encounter on his journey.
Our development process is very different to “normal” game development, as we need to build nearly everything by hand. It might be a bit more time consuming, but it will pay off in the end! We wanted to share with you the development process of our main character’s puppet. It takes a lot of experimenting to nail the right way to achieve a puppet, and we don’t have our final little guy yet. Still, we hope it will be on interest for you guys to hear about how we came up with our first prototype of Fenley.
Meet Fenley
First stage of creating a puppet is of course coming up with a design. We had a rough idea of how he should look like, as we scribbled a few sketches on the corner of a tablecloth one evening at the restaurant.
First idea was to create a cute fuzzy looking character, gender neutral and likable for all ages. It was obvious to us from the start that Fenley should be able to fly, so that he could visit his friends who live on top of the tall trees in the forest. We also thought that for a game branded as “free exploration”, it would be very limiting to have a main character who could only move horizontally. So we tried different approaches to make him take to the air. As you can see on the top right, we started with a ghostly character, and a small dragon with leafy wings that could fly. The end result ended up having propeller leaves on his head, which we found funnier and more original than wings.
But when you create stop motion puppet, there are several challenges that needs to be taken into consideration. The puppet needs to be animatable, and your character needs to be designed accordingly. With a big budget such as for a feature film, you can pretty much design what you like and find a way to turn that into a puppet, but we’re not there yet and we need to keep it simple.
Facial expressions are one of the hardest things to achieve in stop motion. When expensive silicon techniques are above your budget, and when you decide not to lean towards claymation, the options are pretty limited. So we had to try and be clever to come up with a simple way to provide Fenley with as big a range of expressions as we could.
In the end, we decided that we should give him a big mouth, because we could then have interchangeable replacement mouths. This technique generates more work as you have to build many mouths for all the expressions that you want your character to display, but it is more rewarding in the end: with replacements, your range of expressions is much broader than with a normal animatable mouth, which you will never be able to pull from a thin-lipped closed mouth position to a big wide grin or shouty mouth.
But we also wanted to be smart about these replacement mouths: we wanted to be able to animate subtle movements on the mouth without having to build countless in-betweens. So we made the replacements themselves animatable! That way, we could animate the mouth from position A (thin smile for instance) to position B (like a wide grin) by bending a bit mouth A to ease in the animation, then swap to mouth B and animate the ease-out with it.
It works out pretty well on our first tests! We’ll keep building new mouths with new expressions for Fenley, until we have all the expressions we need for the game.
His eyebrows are mounted on thin aluminum wires, as we wanted to have this cartoon feeling of the hovering eyebrow. It is also much easier than trying to pin the eyebrow directly to the forehead, and the wire can be very easily removed in post-production.
Another challenge is that his body is pretty bulky, and early in the design process we decided that his arms and legs should be pretty thin. This came from a technical constraint: Thick arms and legs are more complicated to build than thin ones, as the volume of “flesh” around the armature will keep it from bending properly. You can remedy that by using ball and socket armatures, and light and flexible materials such as silicon, but again, we must keep it simple here so our armature is made out of aluminum wire. Aluminum armature will break eventually, that is the main reason why professionals tend to choose ball and sockets instead, but we’re not planning a feature film here: Fenley won’t need to be animated throughout the whole length of a movie. He only needs to stay in one piece for a few animation loops, so hopefully aluminum should be our friend!
Since we couldn’t use silicon for the “flesh”, we opted for an easy solution: sculpey has an amazing product, sculpey mold maker: a clay that you can model the way you want, bake it to stabilize it, and it will keep its shape while retaining elasticity. A perfect substitute for latex or silicon, at a fraction of the cost and far less time-consuming! The propellers on his head are done in the same technique, sculpey mold maker over aluminum wire.
To paint his arms and legs, we resorted to a simple trick: the paint had to be able to flex without cracking, so we mixed acrylic paint and liquid latex. It works a treat! We applied that technique to the propellers as well.
For painting the eyeballs, we used some white enamel paint, the kind that is commonly used to patch up cracked bathtubs. We wanted this smooth glossy look to it, and this did the trick. His pupils are small black discs that are simply floating on the eyeballs. To keep them in place, vaseline is perfect.
As I said earlier, his body is pretty bulky, which can cause problems with the armature: the heavier the body, the harder it will be for the armature to support the puppet, and obviously we want the puppet to be able to stand easily, on strong legs, while having them flexible enough to be animated without having to exert too much force.
So we decided to use a light foam, styrofoam like material, for the body. We started by sculpting the main body shape, split it in half, and insert the armature inside, so that we could connect the arms and legs to it.
This foam, usually used in house insulation, is great to sculpt and sand, and is also pretty strong while being extremely light, so this was definitely the way to go. His body is stiff, sure, but with the snappy animation style we have in mind, it should be no problem to give him a strong personality. We might have to build some longer arms, for when he needs to reach props in front of him. If we use these long arms from a side perspective, it should look natural enough.
One thing I haven’t addressed: tie downs! To animate and pose the puppet, we will have to be able to attach it to the ground. An easy solution is to firmly glue a small nut in his feet, to drill a hole in the ground, and to connect the nut to a threaded metal rod from underneath. Just use a winged nut to secure it, also from underneath, and you have a strong tie down!!!
Final step is Fenley’s fur… nothing that a trip to the local fabric shop couldn’t sort! We opted for an elastic fabric, since it would be easier to fit it on his curvy body, while efficiently hiding the seams.
Here he is in all his furry glory. This is the finished stop motion puppet used for the prototype animation. We’ve spent so much time drawing him again and again since then that we’ve improved his design, and must now built Fenley version 2! We will very likely use most of the previous techniques, but will try also to improve it, and have an even more appealing design in the end, and a more animatable puppet!
Thank you
Thank you guys for reading, I hope you got something out of this condensed description of a much longer process… If you want more information about our project we are currently running a Kickstarter where we have a lot of content ready for you, feel free to share or pledge on: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/93268250/the-forest-beyond
We are also active on social medias, if you got any questions:
Kind regards from Noisy Neighbours
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