Tuesday Musings - The Making of a Stop Motion Film, Pt. 2
WARNING! 🚧 If you believe in the magic of stop motion and don't want to be disillusioned, stop reading now!!!! 🚫🚫🚫😀
Stop motion is a very versatile animation method and can be used to produce everything from abstract patterned experimental films to character-driven narratives. I tend to make the latter, films with strong characters at the centre, so I create puppets of various types to fit the bill. All of my puppets tend to be rather small (I included a quarter in the pic below to get an idea of scale).
Most stop motion animators make highly-sophisticated jointed puppets of foam latex or cast silicone built on a ball-and-socket armature to allow smooth life-like movements. My puppets differ in that they are made to obviously look like puppets, like handmade dolls or figures cobbled together from found objects, so this is definitely not a tutorial on how to make a stop motion puppet! If my puppets need to move their limbs they are built on a twisted-wire armature, wrapped in physio tape or lightweight bakeable clay and covered in stuffing and cloth, stuffed clothing or a textured paintable skin made of cloth dipped in flexible craft glue...different for every puppet and complete seat of the pants puppet making. I have also used wooden jointed artist's models and found objects. Sewing is definitely a needed skill in puppet making! Basically, I do what's necessary to get the character I need. If it's just going to be a "talking head" in the film, I only make the head; characters that will only be seen from the waist up, well, you get the idea. If it's a talking skull, I only have to joint the lower jaw!
So here is a small selection of a variety of puppets I've made for some of my films:
Everything from robots to rats.
One of the puppets (the taller blue-skinned one on the right) is a generic puppet I made that can be made to look like any character I may need in a pinch. In this pic, that's supposed to be me! Check out the "Eric Generic" page on this blog to see some of the many faces of this puppet! The smaller full-body puppets have hidden holes on their sides to insert a rig, which is a very strong wire attached to a weighted stand. This helps when filming a walking or jumping sequence to keep the puppet steady and where you need it to be; this is removed from the scene later with software (I also cover mine in green, so it's easy to remove it using chroma key). The "talking heads" are all on weighted bases to keep them steady.
You may have noticed that the "larger" puppets don't actually have mouths. Most animators add mouth movement for speech in the stop motion process by manipulating a flexible mouth part or interchanging pre-made mouths for various mouth shapes (can even be stickers for lego films, also called brick films). I add the mouths in post-production with an animation program, painstakingly shaping the mouth frame-by-frame; I can get good accuracy with lip-sync that way.
So, again, I do things in a completely idiosyncratic way - Seat of the Pants!
Stop motion is a very versatile animation method and can be used to produce everything from abstract patterned experimental films to character-driven narratives. I tend to make the latter, films with strong characters at the centre, so I create puppets of various types to fit the bill. All of my puppets tend to be rather small (I included a quarter in the pic below to get an idea of scale).
Most stop motion animators make highly-sophisticated jointed puppets of foam latex or cast silicone built on a ball-and-socket armature to allow smooth life-like movements. My puppets differ in that they are made to obviously look like puppets, like handmade dolls or figures cobbled together from found objects, so this is definitely not a tutorial on how to make a stop motion puppet! If my puppets need to move their limbs they are built on a twisted-wire armature, wrapped in physio tape or lightweight bakeable clay and covered in stuffing and cloth, stuffed clothing or a textured paintable skin made of cloth dipped in flexible craft glue...different for every puppet and complete seat of the pants puppet making. I have also used wooden jointed artist's models and found objects. Sewing is definitely a needed skill in puppet making! Basically, I do what's necessary to get the character I need. If it's just going to be a "talking head" in the film, I only make the head; characters that will only be seen from the waist up, well, you get the idea. If it's a talking skull, I only have to joint the lower jaw!
So here is a small selection of a variety of puppets I've made for some of my films:
Everything from robots to rats.
One of the puppets (the taller blue-skinned one on the right) is a generic puppet I made that can be made to look like any character I may need in a pinch. In this pic, that's supposed to be me! Check out the "Eric Generic" page on this blog to see some of the many faces of this puppet! The smaller full-body puppets have hidden holes on their sides to insert a rig, which is a very strong wire attached to a weighted stand. This helps when filming a walking or jumping sequence to keep the puppet steady and where you need it to be; this is removed from the scene later with software (I also cover mine in green, so it's easy to remove it using chroma key). The "talking heads" are all on weighted bases to keep them steady.
You may have noticed that the "larger" puppets don't actually have mouths. Most animators add mouth movement for speech in the stop motion process by manipulating a flexible mouth part or interchanging pre-made mouths for various mouth shapes (can even be stickers for lego films, also called brick films). I add the mouths in post-production with an animation program, painstakingly shaping the mouth frame-by-frame; I can get good accuracy with lip-sync that way.
So, again, I do things in a completely idiosyncratic way - Seat of the Pants!
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