Making the Stop Motion set base

Whilst working at Professor Puzzle I came across a small pallet that looked perfect for a stop motion set base so grabbed it as it wasn't being used and got it back to Kingston. I then started looking online for some perforated steel to use in the middle of it and found some on ebay.

The pallet was a bit big and the metal was only 250mm deep so we decided to cut the pallet in half. Luckily Steve who I am now living with has a massive shed full of tools and equiptment that made all this possible!

I let Steve use the tools as well! After cutting the pallet in half we attached some wooden supports onto the side we cut giving the pallet some extra support

Then it was time to cut the whole on the top to drop the metal into that will form the walking platform for any stop motion characters. The 250mm depth was perfect but the piece of metal was 1000mm wide so had to be cut down to fit within the pallet.

We drilled holes into the top to drop the jigsaw into and then cut out the rectangle needed. You can see the sharpie line where we are going to cut the metal on the third image. The fourth image shows the lip we nailed in to drop the metal onto and would then secure it to once in place.

As you can see the metal fitted in and was secured down by some screws, we then screwed in some pieces of wood to act as supports underneath to stop the metal from sinking as a character walked across the top. Stumpy stands nice and tall on the metal being held in place by the magnets underneath his feet shown in the image above. Stronger magnets are going to be needed for walking and more exaggerated poses as the clay body is quite heavy, I'm glad to see progress being made and hopefully have some animation tests coming out soon!