#Long Form Essay

[aysrin]

Needle Felt Siffrin Build Log: (oct 6 - nov 20, 2024)

Credits goes wholely to @insertdisc5 for creating ISAT and siffrin's design! I am just here to attempt to make cool fanart (and get more people to play isat.. my devious plans are going great so far :3) As always, this isn't a tutorial- it is just a log about how i go about approaching a sculpture and I hope this collection of resources can help others make their own sifs!!

PSA: this has some spoilers for endgame CGs/sprites on my references image board ( also might see it in the backgrounds of my process pics). And bc this is needle felting, you will see some sharp needles! beware!

my inspiration was the intro cutscene where Sif eats the star, so my main goal was to adhere to the style of ISAT as closely as possible while transfering it to 3D space. And I knew i also wanted to try making the cloak for stopmotion purposes, so my process was tailored towards having control over the fabric with wire inlaid within the cloak (more on that later).

I ended up not sticking eyebrows on top of siffrin's bangs lol but anyways, first order of business is Gather Reference! v important. pureref is free and an awesome program. I also do some sketches to visualize the pose and important details i wanted to include in the sculpt.

behold the isat wiki gallery page! tawnysoup wrote an awesome ISAT style guide that absolutely rings true in 3d space too!! adrienne made a sif hair guide here!! (sorry i couldnt find the original link, but it's on the wiki). It says ref komaeda hair so that's what i looked at, along with other adjacent hairstyles! I also like doing drawovers on in progress photos to previs shapes n stuff to get a better idea of the end result.

Also if you're like me and struggle with translating stuff into 3D space, take a look at how people make 3d models and figurines! sketchfab is also a great resource! I looked at the link botw model by Christoph Schoch here for hair ref. (I used Maya, but there's a blender version too ! you can pose characters too if your model has been rigged!)

Face:

Started off blocking out the main shapes of eyelids and iris, and then filling in the colour details in the iris and the star highlights before moving onto adding thin black outlines and eyelashes. I didn't take many in-progress photos cause i kept ripping stuff out to redo them many many times, sorry!! This eye took about 3 hrs bc i just wasn't happy with it!! Sometimes it do be the vibe to give up, go to bed and see how it looks in the morning (more often than naught, it looks fine and it was the "dont trust yourself after 9pm" speaking)

The Mouth:

Couldn't decide if i even wanted to add a mouth as per usual with all my humanoid sculptures.. but i did some drawover tests first to see what expression i liked and to try to visualize it from multiple angles. (I was also testing the placement of stars on the hat brim here)

And then I redid the mouth like 3 times cause the angle just wasn't right (this went on for about the course of a week yay!)

Hair: woe baldfrin be upon ye

I made the hair strands individually first, and then since Sif has some of the hair at the back dyed black, i covered some of the tips with black wool (manually) (I think it would go much faster if i just took a marker to it, but hahaha i love pain and detailing!! )

And then the rest of it was positioning strands with sewing pins layer by layer, always looking at it from different multiple angles- sometimes tailoring the angle or swoop of individual hair flippies. At one point I thought the back looked too cluttered, but the hat covers a lot of it anyways!! yay for hiding mistakes! (imo this is a similar process to how cosplayers style wigs, but on a smaller scale and the same level of time consuming)

As always, look to your reference for guides, and I always do a whole bunch of drawovers over in progress photos to ascertain what was working and what wasn't.

Hat:

A trick to get a super pointy tip, make another tip seperately while keeping the connection point unfelted, and then combine the two to make super pointy hat!! (this also helps if you made the hat too short and need it to be taller. ask me how i know)

The embroidery on the hat brim was done in a hoop and then invisible stitched to the felted top portion. Technically you don't need a hoop but it helps keep the fabric tension, so you avoid puckers in your embroidery. You can also use iron-on stabilizer if your fabric is loose weave or particularly thin. this is the tutorial i used for the stars embroidery! particularly the fly stitch one, french knots, and the criss-cross stitches. highly recommend needlenthread for embroidery stitches and techniques! i learned all my embroidery from this single site alone.

For fabric, I think I used a polycotton i had in my stash,, unsure of the actual fiber content bc i bought it a long time ago. I used DMC Satin floss which was nice and subtle shiny but frayed a lot so it was kind of a pain to stitch with... but keep a short thread length and perservere through it!! After the embroidery was done, I folded up the raw edges and invisible sewed it to the top portion of the hat.

General shape:

Ok general structure of the body is this: wire armature body covered with black wool -> cloak lining & wire cage -> edge of lining is invisibly sewn to the main cloak at the hem -> head

Don't be afraid to mess around with the pattern, it's essentially a pizza with a slice taken out of it to form a steep cone shape!! Use draft paper before cutting into felt to save material! (i think i made like 3 cloaks before i was happy with the shape lol).

You can also hide the seam of the cloak and collars by gently messing up the fibers of the felt with your fingers or a felting needle btw! you can also sandpaper the seams according to Sarah Spaceman in this vid (highly recommend them for their in depth cosplay/crafting builds holy smokes), though since sif cloak is at such a smol scale, I just blended the seam with my felting needle.

For the lining wire cage section, I sewed in wire around the cloak, so the main rotation point is at the top neck area under the collar. These paddles are used to keep whatever pose I need the cloak to be in for stopmotion purposes. Then after the wire is done, I invisibly sewed the lining to the cloak at the hem (same technique as the hat brim to the lining there).

In hindsight, I should've used a thinner fabric for the lining, but i only had sheer white in my stash so had to go with double felt, thus resulting in a really bulky lining but oh well!

Heels:

started with the general boot shape, then tacking on the diamond shape heel stack and also diamond shape sole bc we're committed to the bit here. I skewer the boot onto the armature which also conveniently hides the connection point into the base to keep the whole thing upright and also I can rotate the boot to tweak the angle if needed.

Pins:

I kinda just trial and error'd jewellery wire with pliers into the pin shapes. They're itty bitty!! had a whole bunch of fails before i got two nice ones. A hot tip is to use needle nose pliers and wrap the wire around the tip to get a smooth circle shape!

Base:

I smoothed out the edge of a circular wood base with a dremel, and then used wood stainer to get the black colour. It ended up kinda looking like I took a sharpie to it, but whatever.... now i have a whole ass can of black wood stainer........ I then made a rough mountain of black wool and stuck the feet armature in. And now he's standing!!

Normally at this point when I'm done felting everything, to get a smooth finish, I'd take a small pair of scissors and carefully snip away any flyaway fibers, but this time, I just left them fluffy cause i think that's what sif would do :3c

Photoshoot:

Normally I do shoots using daylight but it was winter so the sun was nonexistent. So I broke out the home lighting setup aka dollarstore posterboard for a nice smooth background, and then hit it with the overhead Fill, side Fill 2, and Rim light, and use white paper/posterboard for bounce light if one side feels too dark. But if things are overexposed, you can move the light sources away until the harshness dims down. I'm using a Olympus mirrorless camera (handed down to me by my sibling so i dont remember the model exactly), which can connect to my phone as a remote so I can avoid shaking the camera when i take photos. Pretty nifty for stopmotion purposes! (yes my camera stand is a stack of notebooks, a tissuebox and some eva foam under the lens, don't judge me)

Stopmotion animation:

I'm still figuring stopmo out on my part, but my process was straight ahead animation ... move the cloak a cm, take a pic.... move another cm, click.... and repeat until i get a version I was happy with. My ref was the cloak animation from Gris (beautiful game btw). The 2d star animation was also done straight ahead using procreate, exported in png with a transparent background, and finally stitched together with the stopmotion footage in photoshop.

My turnarounds are also stopmotion! also secret hack, the turntable is a fidget spinner sticky tacked to a cake platter.

And i think that's all! i mainly wanted to share how I go about thinking about taking a 2d concept and moving it to 3D. I also didn't go in depth into how to actually do the needle felting bc I don't think I''d be very helpful I'm a very good teacher by telling yall to just keep stabbing until it looks right (i'm self taught for this hobby),,, if anyone wants it though, i can share a bunch of tutorials and other felters' process that helped me learn more needle felting!

Hopefully this was helpful to someone! Feel free to send asks if ya got any questions or if anything needs clarification! Or show me your works! I love seeing other people's crafts :3

here have a cookie for making it this far 🥐

[anodesu]

Happy Warframe 1999 day! I wanted to share this one months ago but did not have the time/energy to clean it up. Behold: Amir. My sweet cheese. My good time boi. This was a time where I had been given a variety of mocap to clean up, and since I had made both an arcade and pinball cycle, Geoff went: "Why not both?" So this is 4 animations that work together: 2 arcade loops that are actually around 30- seconds long, and then two keyframed transition animations that each last about a second (counting overshoot and settle). I had to grab the level and pray that nothing got tweaked in the time I animated this, because the positioning of the machines was integral to making sure it worked. It was a wild challenge to get this up and running properly with Scott, who helped implement it. I hope that it entertained you up until you see his new version!

[babacontainsmultitudes]

I'm gonna be so fr I actually did feel a little bad for the dollmaker what do you mean it looks like a caterpillar what do you mean it was trying to leave this world???

[glacierclear]

need everyone to know im curling my toes biting my fingernails off ripping out my hair using every ounce of strength holding back on just dropping like 500000 paragraphs of chloe price rambling. holy shit. do NOT read other people's interpretations of your blorbos DO NOT. i am closing my eyes

[bethrnoora]

2010: ODYSSEY TWO THE LEONOV MISSION AS A GHOST STORY DISCOVERY ONE AS A HAUNTED HOUSE

[Emily Dickinson - One Need Not be a Chamber -- to be Haunted/2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984, dir. Peter Hyams)/Arthur C. Clarke - 2010: Odyssey Two/Arthur C. Clarke - 2001: A Space Odyssey/Dale Bailey - the Haunted House Formula in American fiction/Sol Rios - Ghosts of my Ghosts/To Be Haunted - Jesse Lynn McMains/"Skeletons on Mars" by Clutch/Jon Ware - I Am In Eskew/Things Haunt - Joshua Jennifer Espinoza]

[kaijutegu]

welp. guess i know where the new followers came from!

[akito-shinonome-daily]

🎤 day 451 🎵

➥ today’s akito is from the (brave new world) cinema 3DMV!!

[mybraindumpsterfire]

I just had a fucking brain blast and came up with the best idea:

AmazingPhil aka Phil Lester “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” deep dive video essay in the style of Mike’s Mic, Jenny Nicholson, etc. Just Phil breaking down Buffy lore and characters for however fucking long.

I would watch the absolute fuck out of it holy shit

[blazehedgehog]

I have been thinking of this video for a while. I'm not going to watch it. But, like, Youtube videos used to be short, right? Like 10-15 minutes. So if you're watching every (xyz) movie, you could do one video for each. 30, even 60 episodes. So why don't you? Well, that's easy.

I remember the Let's Play boom. My cousin and I even started our own channel. When you start a series, episode 1 is your peak and things slowly fall off from there until the end, and sometimes there's a big surge for the final episode. Happens to everyone. It's natural.

By rolling a series into one, big, long video, you can point to a big viewership number -- like Big Joel's 887,000 views. But I'm going to guess not even 50% watched past the 30 minute mark. Source: my own hour-long Youtube video. Analytics tell me 53% of viewers abandon in the first 30 seconds.

Of those 887,000 viewers Big Joel got, how many made it to the one hour mark? 200,000? Or what about the four hour mark? I doubt its even 50k at that point.

How many creators are lying to themselves, I wonder? To say nothing about Youtube itself, which pays for longer watch times over raw views.

There are a lot of questions I don't have answers for. Is it intrinsically better to have longer videos? Surely you're getting some amount of people who forget they have it on and watch the whole thing to completion, right? And that has to be higher than if it was a series of videos. But how high? And even if only 10,000 people watch all six hours of a long essay, the bigger viewership number has to be good advertising, right? "Oh wow nearly a million people watched this six hour essay, maybe I'll give it a shot." Right? That probably exists. But that's a "probably."

Personally speaking, I can't help but feel like this is a bubble that will pop some day. And there will be a graveyard of 2+ hour video essays nobody will ever go near ever again. But what do I know? My 19 year old Youtube channel hasn't even broken 100k subscribers yet.

[the-life-of-a-herm]

youre so fucking correct. dont listen to any of these close minded closeted conservatives. your posts speak to my soul sorry if that sounds cheesy!!!

Hi! Of course thank you!

[belfrysol]

I wish there were more people comfortable with the idea of invasions in souls games. I get why people don't like them of course, early game invasions kinda blow for both parties involved, you encountering cheaters on pc, and fromsoft definitely seems to be lowering the material incentive to participate.

But even with all of those stinkers, some of my best memories in any souls title has been within the realms of pvp. Getting hazed in Oolacile Township and Darkwood Garden, the scraps with the Spears of The Church, friendly duels with friends and strangers alike, the list could go on honestly.

There was this one instance in dark souls 1 where someone had placed a gravelord sign underneath the belfry gargoyles. Seeing as how those signs are pretty rare, I immediately went over to it and let myself into the hosts world. Me and a couple other buddies went to hunt him down and once we found him, to my horror, I realized they had gone through the trouble to get the dragon head stone early. It very quickly devolved into me and my fellow invaders trying to overwhelm them while dodging the nuclear fire breath from their dragon head. It was pretty short, I ended up dying a few times before finally getting him but it was incredibly chaotic and fun in a way that the main pve of the game just couldn't offer.

And I think that's why I ultimately end up willingly participating in invasions and duels. Going up against a real breathing opponent provides a unique and fresh challenge to the many areas of these games even after your 1st playthrough.

[twifan302]

anyone have a rec for a good video essay youtuber?

looking for some long ish(45 minute minimum) videos, consistent uploads, and well researched youtubers 🙌😊

[deiscension]

MIDTERMS VANQUISHED

[tricoufamily]

visiting the hometown

(want everyone to know this edit came to me in a dream and i changed the lore just to do it)

[aq2003]

i should make a playlist of my favorite video essays i cant believe i havent done this before

[heartofthemachine]

i need to become a writer but im so ass at it. sigh