I just wanted to express my thanks to Sean Pecknold for bringing me on board
to work on his project; the Fleet Foxes music video White Winter Hymnal. 
It was a great experience and I really enjoyed working with everyone.  
The following is a list of the full credits of a very wonderful group.
Director: Sean Pecknold
Animators: Christopher Rodgers, Britta Johnson, Sean Pecknold, Paul Maupoux
Miniature sets: Sean Pecknold, Thomas Troisch, Britta Johnson
Costume Design: Joy Andrews
Puppets: Christopher Rodgers, Britta Johnson, Sean Pecknold, Mollie Fabric Consultants: Noel Paul, Greg Pecknold
Photography: Sean Pecknold
Editorial: Sean Pecknold Producer: Grandchildren

Link to the video: WHITE WINTER HYMNAL on Vimeo

For the video I created the Human armature, human heads, and did all the human puppet animation.

Here are pictures of the band members of Fleet Foxes and their puppet heads.
The hair is made of a mix of three different clays on acrylic painted heads made of Smooth Cast 300.
These are the actual reference pictures used to do the sculpts.


The armature is made of a combination of materials. 
The torso and pelvis are made of Smooth Cast 300. 
K&S tubing is cut to fit in the slots of the torso and pelvis then glued in. 
Floral wire was used to create the spine, arms, legs, and necks. 
The wire was a 22 gauge cloth stem wire. 
Multiple pieces were wound together with nylon wire to create a strong thick piece
to support the puppet and  any movement. 
The PVC plastic tubing was used as the bones and a way to keep the wire together. 
Each extremity had K&S tubing attached to it that went inside the K&S tubing of the pelvis and torso.
The armature came out very strong but had severe bounce back from the floral wire.
One way to get around that is to mix the floral wire with aluminum wire. Using a couple strands of each.
The feet were made of  Smooth Cast and threaded bolts in them.
This allowed for tie downs to be attached to the puppet. 
The feet also had K&S tubing so it could attach to the leg.

    


This is the sculpt of the main character The Old Man before his hair was added. 
He was sculpted out of Plastilina then molded in Oomoo a 2 part silicone.
To get to this point of the sculpt I first sculpted a skull and used it as the base to build all the heads on.   
                   

These bottom pictures are of the Old Man's age progression through the video.
I made the final heads out of Smooth Cast 300, which is a two part plastic.
The hair is made of three different clays; Sculpy, Van-Aiken, and Clean Clay.
The mixing of the different clays allowed the hair to be animated with much more flexibility.
The ages for the characters were to be 16, 30, 60, and 80. 
I used the same Old Man head base (80 year old) to build the 30 and 60, just building up the sculpt to make him look younger. 
The 16 year old was made from scratch.