Hello, i'm currently working on a film that has stop motion elements to it. The only thing is i'm not exactly sure where to start as far as building the stop motion puppet goes. If anyone out there has any tips on how i could build the puppet or anything that might help in production it would be greatly apreciated. Thanks

Have you checked out the articles at http://www.animateclay.com/index.php/articles ? They even have a store. http://www.stopmotionstore.com/

thanks Shawn! i'll take a look

There are a lot of stop motion websites and forums out there: you just need to put "stop motion" into google...

Here's a couple I happen to have bookmarked:
http://www.stopmotionanimation.com
http://www.scarletstarstudios.com/blog/archives/2005/12/research_stopmo.html
http://einfachanimation.de/blog/e-book-a-brief-guide-to-puppet-making
http://www.stopmotionworks.com/articles/richsvensn.htm
http://thehollowboy.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/puppet-fabrication-built-up-method-and.html
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1435456130
http://www.amazon.com/Basics-Animation-Stop-motion-Barry-Purves/dp/2940373736/ref=pd_sim_b_1

I most likely have a few claymation sites bookmarked as well if you want them...

Thanks for the link Shawn.. I have downloaded the Helium Frog capture program, and will trial it shortly. The specs look good (particularly the 'free' part).
lots of  links to check Na. Thanks.

I know it's a bit late, but you try this guys channel. I think he is TOTALLY amazing: http://www.youtube.com/user/StopmoNick/videos?sort=dd&flow=grid&view=0&page=1

Nice channel Rikka!  I love this video.  Very creative way of showing the process of building a puppet.

Thanks Rika , I agree, he is a very talented guy. Very inspirational. He also does a vid on his channel on how to do a body as well. It gives me a few ideas.
 'HeliumFrog' stop motion capture program... gets a big thumbs up from me. It has just about everything you need, for free(donations readily accepted). It does onion skinning, can do chromas, has  x-sheet with mouth positions to aid lip sincing and can read papagayo text x-sheets (papagayo is a free lip sincing program. PapagayoMod is the newest version), and also you can load a video in another window as a rotoscope reference. You can sinc it in any place you want so it is not tied to the beginning of the video, so if you have a tricky  movement or lip sinc, you can find it, sinc it and it will advance at the same pace as your capturing. You can export to an AVI or to image sequence so you can touch-up in 'Gimp' for example(get rid of support rods and such) very good program . fully recommended. Only  downer... sorry Mac users.(it is  windows only)
oneupgamer, there is a schematic on their site for a ball and socket armature if you are up to the engineering challenge.

Thanks for the link Shawn.. I have downloaded the Helium Frog capture program, and will trial it shortly. The specs look good (particularly the 'free' part).
lots of  links to check Na. Thanks.

No problems - the first one actually used to have a handbook online, but the URL for it just redirects me to a signup page. It may be worth signing up there just to see if they still have it.

Yes NA ,I signed up to see what was interesting and yes the handbook is there, and  updated it seems. Some interesting stuff. In fact I got so excited I had a quick go at using some of the techniques. I don't have any latex at present , so I used silicone in stead.  Did a quick test this evening with an old webcam... so not very good resolution etc, but you get the idea. I think I need to experiment a bit with  what guage wire to use as what I used was a bit stiff. And some further development  with the silicone to get a better finish.. but it has potential.