When I lent my services to a collegue who was working on a film about 12 years ago, I was introduced to the world of cnc. I remember watching this huge machining centre milling out a slab of mdf and turning it into a fantastic set of gears. I knew that it would have taken me hours to achieve the same thing with traditional power tools. I decided then that I would invest in a cnc router for my own business Oxenham Design. At that time I could turn on a computer, but even to check email seemed like a crazy set of operations. I persevered and learned every piece of relevant software I could get my hands on. I am now fortunate enough to be using Vectric's ASPIRE software, and Techno cnc routers, which has helped us to create some amazing projects, both in part, or in full. I thought that this blog would be a great place to share "behind the scenes" adventures with the software, materials and equipment we use, as well as the projects we build.

Wednesday 12 November 2014

The little ones work the hardest!

Now that the NDA is over on this job, I think I'll work the build backwards! Starting with the final result! This job was through photographer Vicky Lam. A great commercial photographer, and an even more stellar person to work with! PLUS......she's only the second person I know shorter than Jody!
Vicky specializes in shooting miniatures, and when she contacted us for this job, we were totally on board!
This was another short deadline job. The go-ahead was on a Friday at 3pm, and it was due on the following Monday at 9 am.
Alas, this would have been the perfect job for our Hi-res DLP printer that we ordered, but ours won't arrive until the end of THIS month, so we had to rock it old school!

I hired a wonderful sculptor that I used to work with years ago, name Garfield. He came in to tackle the little people and their little details. The clients were very specific about what poses and swag the little people had on!
While Garfield set out to work on the little people,  I started on the very tiny construction wagon they wanted. This will be full of seed in the final image. I drew these up quickly in Aspire, and cut them from .060" styrene, then glued the flats up.
The other task for me was fabricating the miniature easel that holds the construction blueprints. This again was done from styrene, with evergreen stryrene strips for the legs and wagon handle. Due to time constraints on this job, we had to use 1:72 scale Prieser miniature people as the base forms, and repose them as necessary. A little heat on their appendages made posing them fairly straight forward. Although, Garfield did have to resort to Exacto knife surgery on a lot of their little arms and legs!

I love miniatures, and would really enjoy a constant staple of them! I never seem to get enough of it!
8)
JWO






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