Anti-Hero

This project was based on the concept of an Anti-Hero which is basically a main protagonist with less rules as a hero. I immediately, decided that I did not want to have a human as my character as it felt too obvious, so I looked into what country I wanted to base my character to be from. This brought me to Mexico as that is where the Aztecs used to reside. In the folklore of the Aztecs there is a creature called the

Ahuizotl which can be described as either a dog or a monkey with a hand on the end of its tail. It is said to use this hand to pull creatures and people into the water in an attempt at drowning the victim this part I’m not adding to my characters personality, but this did help me to decide to make my character a monkey. With research I ascertained that the squirrel monkey originates from Mexico that is quite cute which was just what I was looking for; I then decided to implement traits of the Bali monkeys which steal valuables, food, and even infants from tourists and residents. I then went with my character wearing clothes of Aztec children to add to the cuteness which is designed as a decoy so that my character could steal and pilfer from unsuspecting humans. This plays into how I planned to have my character act cute as a distraction while it uses both its tail to pick pockets and its troop to steal other items.

I finally decided on a name for my character ‘Ykeech Yeknom’ which is cheeky monkey backwards. His only goal would be to gain food but, as the smallest of his troop he uses his wile and cunning to con them and enjoys imitating humans so he can get more food.

I started to make my characters puppet with armature wire to make a skeleton I then made a head out of compressed tin foil. I then brushed liquid latex on top of this in intervals to keep the structure together, after which I made a fur skin for the puppet out of the material from a throw blanket sewing it around the framework stuffing it as I go bringing it to life as I went. The face and paws were first moulded in plasticine then covered in the liquid latex to make it look like skin. I liked how it came out but, I think I’ll stuff my puppets less as overstuffing it seems to deform it. I also think I’ll ad the eyes to the clay so that they fit right as I don’t think they would anymore.

When I filmed my puppet, I found it hard to do things like a handstand without something to prop my puppet on so, from now on I’m going to use a rigging so that I can fasten a line of fishing wire to it which would allow me to animate things like jumping or, other things that fight gravity. The animation was of the puppet doing a handstand waving at the camera, then it stands on its hind legs and claps. I believe it succeeds in showing the monkey aspects of the character as it has him preforming an acrobatics trick similar to what a bali monkey might to distract a tourist but, it fails at showing the child-like attitude and personality of Ykeech making it full a little flat. I’m also disappointed about the quality of the animation as it seems I used to large movements causing it to have a gutting effect. In future I’ll try to implement a lot more minute changes so to have a smoother animation. I would also invest in some backlighting as I think the lighting I had held back the end quality.