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May 11, 2009
behind the scenes: Misha Klein and Stage 13
by sven at 7:00 am
Don't forget the big stopmo event this Wednesday!
An ASIFA Night of Clowns & Owls
With Misha Klein and Dan Ackerman
Wed. May 13th,
7pm-9pm @ Studio 13
13 NW 13th Ave.
Admission is FREE for card-carrying members
$3 for non-members
To whet your appetite, here's a look behind the scenes…
In February -- on Friday the 13th -- I had the pleasure of attending the launch party for Ackerman Films' "Stage 13" space. Wow! In addition to an editing bay, and several work areas, this magnificent 26'x22'x13' high Corner Green Screen Cyclorama is available for rental. If you're looking for a space in which to work on your film, check out the Ackerman Films website for details.
Of course, for me the highlight of the party was getting to see Misha's workspace. He was very gracious answering questions for party attendees and showing clips from his film.
Misha's project has taken 8 years to complete, putting in about a month per year between paying gigs. Work started in L.A.; when he moved up to Portland, everything had to get packed into boxes for shipping. He says Stage 13 has been a great environment to work in.
For the set, he got friends to pitch-in building props. Music is going to be recorded by a trio in San Francisco. [Never underestimate the value of a good soundtrack!]
As is typical in stopmo productions, the set is built atop wooden tables that make it comfortable to animate from a standing position. For Misha's project, however, the wooden tables are also firmly attached to a tubular metal cage (which supports the lights) -- and this cage is bolted to the floor.
The camera is attached to the set itself. Consequently, even if you managed to move the cage, the stage and lights and camera are all going to move together -- the shot doesn't get ruined.
For his camera, Misha's using a Canon EOS Rebel. He shoots using RAW image format. For some shots (e.g. "drunk cam"), having the extra pixels means it's been possible to do virtual camera moves.
In general though, most of the camera moves are done in the real world. At the party, Misha boasted that the last shot he'd filmed used seven axes of motion. Dolly, truck, rack, rotary…
Just below the floor of the set is an XY table. There's another threaded rod to move the camera up and down… And the camera is attached to a 410 Manfrotto geared mount. [I don't understand the set-up well enough to count up all seven axes myself.]
On some shots, the Manfrotto was attached to a heavy base and moved around the set by hand -- creating a looser "hand-held" look.
In my own work, I've tended to lock down the camera. It's been a real revelation to see how much camera movement Misha goes for. In part it means you can keep a tight framing on a character while they act… But Misha also points out that when the camera's locked down, you lose a lot of the 3D nature of the world you've created. Good thought!
Attached to the set, there is a Mac PowerBook G4 laptop, and above it a small flat screen monitor. A little black-and-white spy cam is attached to the camera's viewfinder -- this sends a live feed to the monitor. Misha's been using FrameThief for his framegrabbing software.
Beneath the laptop computer, there's a custom-made USB control box for toggling between frames. Credit goes to Kelly Mazurowski for the invention. [Also note the dimmer for adjusting the lights each frame -- to simulate a flashing neon sign.]
Mostly the film has been shot on 1s. But, to my great surprise, Misha said that he'd been getting into shooting at 18FPS recently. Partly this was to make some progress in time for the party… But beyond that, he says it has a really nice feel. He described 12FPS as being too little -- 24FPS as being "unforgiving" of any errors in your arcs -- and 15FPS being pretty nice… 18 is forgiving and more "gestural."
My understanding is that after the footage is shot, he'll let the computer stretch 18FPS out to 24FPS for him.
The Fred puppet was constructed using the build-up method on top of a recycled B&S armature. He's meant to look rough-hewn and handmade. The eyes are coated with enamel paint; the pupils are bits of clay attached with sticky wax.
Fred has replacement mouths that click into place with magnets. However, the wide mouths also have wire in them, so they are somewhat posable. Seam lines are hidden by the beard.
…This is the first time I've seen hybrid replacement mouths like this.
To maintain the continuity of Fred's teeth between shots, the upper and lower jaws were made using fast-cast plastic. The top jaw has two tiny inset magnets, and a hemispherical bump to key the part into place. There's a square hole so a tongue can plug into the puppet's skull for certain shots.
Misha confirmed something I'd been wondering about… That when you use magnets for registration, it's important to get the magnets lined up so that their polarities don't compete.
Gotta say: I'm hugely impressed by this mouth system!
Big thanks to Misha for sharing details about this project!
The clips I've seen -- both for Misha's film and for Owl Pals -- are simply stunning… If you're anywhere near Portland, I highly recommend turning out for Wednesday's "Clowns & Owls" event!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (6) | categories: exhibits & events, stopmo
May 6, 2009
may 13: clowns & owls - with misha klein & dan ackerman
by sven at 7:00 am
There's going to be an exciting event next week:
An ASIFA Night of Clowns & Owls
With Misha Klein and Dan Ackerman
Wed. May 13th,
7pm-9pm @ Studio 13
13 NW 13th Ave.
Admission is FREE for card-carrying members
$3 for non-members
Owl Pals, directed by Dan Ackerman
"Our evening host, Dan Ackerman, Director of Photography, will present his latest stop-motion project, Owl Pals, a promotional trailer based on the children's book illustrations of Luba Goninda. Dan will be on hand to talk about the rewards and challenges of directing this visually rich combination of original 3D characters, flat puppets and multi-plane camerawork, as well as show off some of the actual puppets and designs.
Fred the Clown, created by Misha Klein (clip)
Coraline animator Misha Klein will also be showing a sneak preview of his brand new animated film, recently competed at Studio 13. A labor of love years in the making, this 7-minute vignette focuses on Fred the Clown's internal struggles and performance anxieties, above all with a palpable dread of his boss. Featuring spontaneous camera work, gorgeous sets and atmospheric lighting, Misha will be on hand to talk about his travels on the road to finishing this amazing film."
Monday I'll further whet your appetite for this event by sharing some behind-the-scenes photos & info… Stay tuned!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: exhibits & events, stopmo
May 4, 2009
contest prize from john sumner
by sven at 6:36 pm
Fellow stopmoe John Sumner issued a challenge in March: identify two obscure books, win a prize. Long-post-short… I won!
Here's the original challenge:
"Cogs, this one's gonna be short and sweet. First off, Don Carlson replied to the Crazy Daisy Ed post and mentioned an older book that might have some cool stop-mo references in it. However, the title and author are unknown. So load up in the Mystery Machine and take a look at his comment on the post about clues to this "gem" of a book. Second on the Unsolved list is a fabulous xeroxed section of a book on the history of puppet animation. The title is Puppet Animation in the Cinema. Being extremely lazy or, too busy, I haven't searched out the author and actual book. That's where you come in. The first cog to correctly find both books and show proof will win a prize... to be determined at a later time. I'm thinking along the lines of an illustration with subject matter of your choosing. But then you'd have to be brave enough to give my your address so I could send it to you. The challenge has been put forth."
The book for John is Puppet animation in the cinema: history and technique by L. Bruce Holman (1975). I wasn't sure about Don's book, but suggested Who's Who in Animated Cartoons by Jeff Lenburg (2006) -- which Don says is correct.
So, John emailed to ask what kind of original artwork I might like… I knew just what I wanted. Machine In Use Studios (which John founded) often uses standardized resin heads, which then get Dremeled into final shape for particular puppets. I was hoping that there might be a spare blank lying around somewhere.
Happily, John had one to share! He also sent along a half-head leftover from a previous project…
"A little backstory -- I sculpted the head using chavant sculpture clay (oil base) and then made a two part mold out of RTV silicone. There's a company down here called Silpak where I got my materials, including the 'A'+'B' parts for the eurathane that I poured into the mold. There's still 'some' imperfections, but most of the major stuff I sanded off with a dremel inside a sanding box. The sanding box was great because it contained 99% of the dust + debris. The overall concept for these heads was to be a series for an illustration show (that never happened). I was going to continue modifying each head + paint them. I got a few made, but since the show was cancelled, I lost interest. Funny enough, I found the '7' head, same as your Cog ID#. Destiny?"
Needless to say, I'm thrilled. I absolutely love getting to handle another artist's work, getting a sense of the materiality and craftsmanship.
Thanks John!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: miscellany, stopmo
April 4, 2009
1440
by sven at 11:20 am
This is an essay about the poetry of numbers. I'm just playing -- don't let the math scare you.
1440
There are certain numbers that all stopmoes should know. 1440 is one of them.
It's a very interesting number. Why? Because it appears in two separate contexts.
1440 is the number of minutes in a day. 60 min/hr x 24 hrs = 1440.
1440 is also the number of frames in a minute of film. 60 sec x 24 fps = 1440.
So think about this: If it took you one minute to shoot one frame of film, then for every 24 hours of work, you'd produce one minute of animation.
That's one day of your life in the real world exchanged for one minute in the dream world of stop-motion fantasy.
When I was growing up, one of my very favorite books was White Monkey King by Sally Hovey Wriggins -- a retelling of the Chinese monkey king myth. In it, when you spend a day visiting the gods in heaven, something like a hundred years passes on earth. Stop-motion's like that. For every minute you spend in Art Heaven, a day passes on Earth.
5 minutes
Of course, you could shoot at 12fps, in which case you'd be getting 2 minutes of film for every day of your life…
But frankly, estimating that it only takes 1 minute to shoot 1 frame of film is probably off base.
At Aardman, the studio expects animators to shoot no less than 4 seconds of film per day.
Why 4 seconds? I got to thinking about it… The producers need some sort of benchmark for what to expect from animators. If you assume that the animators work an 8-hour day and shoot at 24fps, then 4 seconds of film is the result of spending 5 minutes on each frame. 5 min/frame is 12 frames/hr… Times 8 hrs/day… Equals 4 seconds.
Ah! There's nothing magical about 4 seconds of film per day -- it's just a benchmark based on a generous estimate for how long an animator has to create a puppet pose.
So, at Aardman then… Animators regularly trade 24 hours of their actual lives for 12 seconds in the filmic fantasy world.
The currency exchange rate is worse for professionals than for amateurs.
1:1
It frightens me to think about the rate at which my real life is escaping me as I breath life into puppets…
But here's something that's unusual about time in the Puppet Universe: it repeats. When I make a one-minute long film, I can play that film as many times as I like. A one-minute film that's played ten times takes up ten minutes of real world time.
So I start to wonder… How many times do I need my film to be seen to offset the amount of time I've invested in it?
Let's say that there's a 1:1 ratio when you're having a conversation with a friend. That is, for every minute that I'm talking, my pal spends one minute listening to me. And let's say that the effort of paying attention is of perfectly equal value to the effort of communicating…
Well then, if it takes me 1440 minutes to make a 1-minute film, then I would want my friend to watch this bit of communication 1440 times. Or, more realistically, I'd want an audience of 1440 people to watch it once.
I think it's kind of interesting -- just being playful -- to think that you could calculate what size of audience is required for you to break even for the time you invest in a film… Not in terms of money, but in terms of attention paid.
Time-wise, stopmo is certainly one of the most expensive art forms around… If all you spent was 1 minute per frame, then for a 10-minute film you'd need 14,400 people watching before you made back your investment.
Contrast this with writing. When I'm writing non-fiction at a good clip, I know that I can put out 2.5 pages per hour -- that's 20 pages in an 8-hour work day. I also know that when I'm reading non-fiction by other authors, I can only get through about 20 pages per hour. Assuming other people read as fast as I do, then we've got a 1:8 ratio. That is, it only takes an audience of 8 persons to "break even" for the attention I invested in writing.
Well, of course when I do a moderate editing job, I can only put out about 10 pages per day -- so I'd need 16 readers. And when I do a really meticulous editing job, I only put out 5 pages per day -- so I'd need 32 readers…
But even so! A ratio of 1:32 is not even close to 1:1440… Which, I should point out doesn't even begin to take account of the time spent on scriptwriting, fabrication, lipsync analysis, and post-production for your animation.
Consider for a moment people who do live improv. If you can just walk onto stage and start performing, without any time spent on rehearsals…? Then you've got a winning proposition! If you have 100 persons in the audience watching you, then for every minute of time you invest, you get 100 minutes of their attention in return!
It's rather sobering… Maybe this 100:1 ratio suggests that people who perform for live audiences have a responsibility to invest rehearsal time proportionate to the time that people will spend watching. Thus, if I'm going to be acting in a one-hour-long play for 100 people, then it behooves me to invest 100 hours in preparation.
Interesting.
$12.50
Gretchin teaches a class called "Creative Business Basics." One of the most important parts of the class deals with how to price things that you're selling. The basic idea: fair price = (hours it takes to make a thing x a living wage of $12.50/hr) + (cost of materials) + (50% of all that, for profit - so your business can grow).
[Quick example: If I'm selling a painting where materials cost $7.50 and I spent 1 hour working at $12.50 per hour (sub-total $20), then I would need to add $10 for profit… Winding up with a fair price of $30 for the painting.]
One of the crucial numbers in Gretchin's equation is $12.50/hr, which is what's considered a livable wage.
I started wondering… Where did that number of $12.50 come from? Well, if you work 40-hour weeks during a 4-week month, then $12.50 works out to be $2000 per month (before taxes). Ah! …And it also works out to be $100 for an 8-hour work day. I begin to see why $12.50 is such a lovely, useful, round number to keep in mind!
So, going back to my original premise about the magic number of 1440… If it takes 24 human hours to produce 1 puppet minute, then the labor for that minute should be valued at $300.
Or, given our estimate that pro animators spend 5 minutes per frame of film, 1 minute of professional-quality puppet animation would cost $1500.
I'm curious to apply this logic to other aspects of stopmo production… It can take me up to 50 hours to machine a ball&socket armature from scratch. That would be $625 labor, maybe $20 worth of materials… So with a conservative mark-up (50%) to ensure studio growth, I ought to sell the armature for $967.50.
[Actually, pro armature makers are more likely to be paid $15/hr… In which case the armature would be sold for $1155.]
I recall that my Percy 5 puppet took almost exactly 24 hours to fabricate. So, considering only the time spent on him, my simple wire and Sculpey puppet represents an investment of $300.
Now, just because your time is (hypothetically) worth $12.50/hr doesn't mean that you shouldn't work unless you can get your money back! To the contrary, there are plenty of experiences that I would happily pay my own money for… Taking classes for example.
Would I spend $300 to take a class on making Percy 5? Or a $1000 class on making armatures? Or a $1500 class on how to make a one-minute film? Hell yeah! Particularly if the teacher I was paying happened to be myself.
happiness
Happiness? Sorry, can't help you.
Sure, it ought to be part of these wacky equations… But how to quantify it? I have no idea.
Being pleasurably absorbed while working with your hands… The tangible connection forged between your dreams and reality when puppets come to life… The pride in having finished a 100-mile marathon… The magic of having created a dream that other dreamers can step into…
You're on your own.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (3) | categories: stopmo
April 3, 2009
the myth of storyboards
by sven at 7:00 am
Speaking for myself: making animated films has been agony.
I love the end product. I love the little hit of "progress!" every time I snap another frame. And I love working with my hands to create little worlds.
But when I discover my sequence of shots doesn't work, it's misery. When I realize that good storytelling demands I excise a shot, I feel a day ripped from my life for nothing. And then of course, there's when a film turns into Viet Nam: the quagmire you're too committed to to bail out of, even though there's no end in sight.
I don't think I'm alone. I expect my filmmaker friends (stopmo and otherwise) know exactly what I'm talking about.
There's a problem here that I'm still learning how to solve… But I think I've found the principle that will ultimately save me: WORK FROM ROUGH TO POLISHED.
STOPMOES' GREAT TEMPTATION
Based on my own experience and what I've seen at SMA, I believe that almost all stopmoes are cursed with the temptation to dive into fabrication.
We are utterly smitten with the physicality of puppet worlds. We're almost powerless against that lust. What is it that we do? We create actual tangible bodies and then breath our own life into them -- trading the time of our life for time spent in theirs at a frightening exchange rate. We create miniature worlds that we then get to exist in vicariously -- though for us it's far more than six days before we can rest! We can feel as if these people and places are already real -- they're just begging to be born, tugging at our minds…
But I urge myself (and my stopmo brethren) to resist this temptation to start building. We must be storytellers first… Not gods of tiny worlds.
DON'T SKIP STORYBOARDING…
I've found stopmoes surprisingly resistant to the idea of storyboarding. I think it goes back to our great temptation… We want to get straight to fabricating. But also: Storyboarding seems like additional work… And it requires drawing skills… And if you can already see the film perfectly in your head, why bother?
Well, just trust me on this: the pain of storyboarding is far less than that of throwing out shots or getting stuck in a years-long quagmire. (No film is ever as as short as you think!)
I think people tend to imagine that storyboards have to be like the ones we see in "making of" featurettes: beautifully rendered, like storybook pages spread out across a wall. No! Stick figures will do… And there's a whole range of storyboard-like development tools to work with:
- thumbnail storyboards
- 3x5 card/post-it note storyboards
- polished storyboards paired with shot descriptions
- slideshow-style storyreels
- 2D animatics (some moving elements)
- 3D CG animatics
- photo storyboards
- photo-based storyreels
- pop-throughs
- live-action video reference
Always start with the fastest, roughest methods… Refine your vision through progressive iterations. Catching a problem now will save you immeasurable grief later on!
…EVEN THOUGH THE STORYBOARD IS WRONG!
So, stopmoes who go through the trouble of storyboarding their film get to feel virtuous. They fought temptation, did the right thing, and now can get on with fabricating puppets and sets. …Right?
Wrong!
The great myth of storyboards is that they're the master blueprint for your film… All you have to do is shoot the shots you've drawn, and your project will rise like architecture.
But the reality is that despite all this planning, films are created in the editing room. A film is like an iceberg of deleted scenes… What you see on screen is just the tip of what got shot -- 80% of the project never gets seen.
Here are ways the storyboard is going to be just dead wrong…
(A) You fail to get shots that you need. A reaction shot. A close-up. An establishing shot. The shot sequence looked good on paper, but when it plays on screen, it becomes obvious that something is missing.
(B) You shoot unnecessary shots. You realize that pacing works better if you excise the reaction shot. Or if you cut a line of dialogue. Or if you delete the scene altogether and move on to more important stuff… Ouch.
(C) The shot flow doesn't work. Often this has to do with camera angles… The jump from a far shot to a close-up is jarring. The exciting angle from above or below doesn't mesh with the rest of the scene. Characters move in one direction in shot A, and then there needs to be a shot B that somehow continues the motion… Etc.
The more complicated the visuals you're working with, the more likely it is that a storyboard is going to be wrong. If you have any of the following situations, storyboarding alone probably won't be good enough:
- there's a voice track whose timing you need to obey
- multiple characters are moving around in a scene
- you make use of deep space, rather than having things just move in a shallow picture plane
- quick-paced action sequences
- the camera's position shifts significantly between shots in a scene
- any scenes where the camera moves during a shot
Now, in the world of stopmo, a lot of animators avoid lipsync… The acting space in our sets tends to be pretty shallow… The size of the camera relative to the set often prohibits extreme camera angles and camera movements… Even so -- beware! The storyboard helps preview your film, but still has big limitations.
3D STICKFIGURES SHOT AT 4FPS
My advice: When you get an idea for a film, DON'T start with fabricating puppets and sets! And even if you do have your puppets already made, DON'T start filming shots at 24fps! Both approaches are likely to waste days if not years of your life on dead-ends.
Here is the holy grail I'm seeking: a way to preview a 10 minute film -- in motion and start-to-finish -- that can be created in 48 hours.
Part of the solution is pop-throughs. Block your characters. Select your puppets' gestures -- their animation "extremes." Then work pose-to-pose… But don't shoot more than 4fps. You might not even need that, if a character holds poses for a while. Do brainstorming for the pop-through using a hand-held digital still camera, going back and filling in the inbetweens once you've got the keys figured out.
Another part of the solution is to do rough-hewn sets stage-style: either having characters going through their motions in a black-box set, or with cardboard "flats" indicating where 3D set elements and props will go later.
The final part of the solution is to use 3D stick figures.
For a while now, I've been working on the idea of creating a Generic Puppet Actor Ensemble… Six to ten puppets of various sexes, ages, and body-builds -- wearing black rather than special costumes -- which I can draw upon whenever I want to test a scene.
Recently, however, I discovered an even quicker and dirtier approach. Occasionally master animator Anthony Scott updates the splash page of stopmotionanimation.com. This week I noticed that the new intro uses a puppet that's nothing more than a wire armature with a spherical head. Wow! It's the 3D equivalent of a stick figure!
I'm still digesting this revelation… The fabricator in me still wants my rough-hewn yet visually appealing Ensemble… Yet logically, I know the stick-figures are much, much more economical time-wise.
LOW-BUDGET VS. HIGH-BUDGET FILMMAKING
We've all seen enough Hollywood films to know that hiring the prettiest /handsomest / most expensive actor can't save a crap script.
I'm desperately trying to take that lesson to heart… Just because I can make a beautiful puppet, or a phenomenal miniature set, that doesn't mean I've got a story that's going to work.
Doesn't it make sense to figure out whether or not your story / editing choices work before you put years of your life into the project? Why wait until the very end to find out if the film is going to gel?
Granted, for some the vision in mind is too powerful to deny. It must be exorcised one way or the other. But for most of us -- I'm certain that we are filled with dozens of potential stories. We needn't worry that we've only got one story to tell!
In the world of stagecraft, before a script ever goes into production, it's going to get "workshopped." You have volunteer actors read your script aloud -- with only the smallest amount of blocking -- not wearing costumes or trying to deliver a performance. One or two rehearsals at most… And then an audience (often not paying admission) gives the author feedback.
Then, when a script has been polished and is truly ready for production, paid actors are going to give it a read-through… Then later a walk-through with basic blocking… Then the acting is developed and refined through rehearsals… It's quite likely that the actors only get to work with costumes and sets in dress rehearsals during the last few nights before the show goes live.
I believe this is how stopmoes should be thinking, too. Don't create expensive costumes and sets before you've at least done a walk-through for the story…! Don't expect your puppet actor to show up on opening night without ever having had the chance to rehearse their lines and blocking…!
It could be argued that stagecraft is the wrong metaphor for stopmo -- that we should be looking to live action films for inspiration… Well, have you watched the special features on any effects films lately? Whereas only CG sequences used to be given the animatic treatment (e.g. X-Men), now it's becoming common practice to do the entire film as a CG animatic (e.g. Hancock, Jumper) -- even before the actors get hired. Previewing is economical.
Mega-budget films might still be the wrong example… Think then about low-budget filmmaking. There are examples of directors who've made a low-budget student film, and then gone back and done a big-budget remake (e.g. Sam Raimi's Evil Dead was remade as Evil Dead II)…
Even if you're making a live action film, I'd recommend getting your friends together for a 48-hour guerilla filmmaking adventure, shooting hand-held video, everything on one take. It's fast, it's cheap, it's easy -- and you get to discover what's horribly wrong with your storyboard before big money and months of work are on the line.
I'm urging my stopmo friends to try this… But more than anyone else, I'm trying to hammer it into my own head…
Make the stick-figure storyboard. Shoot it with 3D stick-figures. And only THEN think about fabricating beautiful puppets and sets.
Storyboards help -- but they're liars. Don't trust them with the next few months or years of your life.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: stopmo
March 26, 2009
writing 10-minute plays for stopmo
by sven at 11:27 am
[An essay I wrote to some friends on 3/11.]
Most people agree that the most important aspect of a film is the story. If the story doesn't work, the film doesn't work. So for the past 15 months I've been studying the construction of story.
Before I go any farther… I'd just like to emphasize that dramatic stories are not the only legitimate type of film. For example, some films provide an experience that is primarily aesthetic… If there are characters at all, they're often anonymous, enigmatic, silent; there may be no discernible conflict or climax; but at the end of the film you wind up feeling like you glimpsed something beautiful, nonetheless. Traditional stories with understandable characters, dramatic conflicts, beginnings, middles, and ends, tend to be most popular -- and not without cause… But even though I neglect to discuss other species of filmic experience here, please don't think I'm putting them down!
Back to topic… My research on story has encompassed three art forms: film, literature, and theater. Research tends to start broad; then, as you clarify exactly what it is that you want to know, your scope narrows. So it has been for me…
1. LONG-FORM VS. SHORT-FORM
Film, literature, and theater each have strong internal divisions between long-form and short-form works. In film, there are "feature length" films and "shorts." In literature there are "novels" and "short stories." In theater there are full-length "plays" and there are "one-acts."
The construction of a long-form work in any medium is significantly different from that of a short-form work. Yet, I find it very interesting that how-to books about how to write short films, short stories, and one acts are quite rare. The vast majority of how-to books deal only with long-form works. Some books -- much to my irritation -- even promise to deal with short-form, but then just rehash long-form principles. [E.g. "Writing The Short Story" by Jack M. Bickham.]
At this point in time, I've narrowed my research to focus only on short-form fiction. For literature, I'm reading the monthly magazine, "Fantasy & Science Fiction." For animation, I've been studying Mike Judge & Don Hertzfeldt's The Animation Show anthologies and Acme Filmworks' "The Animation Show of Shows" series (Animation World Network store ). For plays, I've been reading the annual The Best Ten-Minute Plays series, edited by Lawrence Harbison.
A word of caution, though. It seems that the people who care most about the underlying principles of story are those who work in long-form. My sense is that it's just a lot harder to successfully produce long-form work without a strong understanding of structure -- so long-form folks have been forced to develop better theory.
Top picks for long-form how-to books… Screenplays: Story by Robert McKee. Literature: Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain -- runner up The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. Playwriting: The Playwright's Process by Buzz McLaughlin -- runner up The Dramatist's Toolkit by Jeffrey Sweet.
Note: In my experience so far, screenwriters have the weakest understanding of story. It feels to me like the field is infected with a number of gimick-based methodologies that may in fact help you to doctor an existing script -- but that are rotten foundations on which to build your basic understanding of story. Beware!
2. WHAT'S MOST USEFUL TO STOPMOES: FILM, LITERATURE, OR PLAYS?
I've become convinced that the most useful medium for stopmoes to study is theater. Why?
The biggest reason: limited number of sets. With films, you can easily have the story take place in 80-150 locations. It's no big deal, because typically existing locations can be used. You don't have to build everything from scratch, as with plays and with stopmo. Plays tend to have just 1-3 major sets… Or perhaps merely imply their sets by using "black box" technique. Given the time entailed in building miniature props and sets, stopmoes have to be conservative.
Another reason: only concrete actions are allowed. With literature, you can do amazing things with adjectives and metaphors: e.g. "the wounded leaf somersaulted down to the ground like a football player who's just been shot in the ankle." There's no easy way to translate this poetry to the screen.
Similarly, you can get away with a good deal more inner monologue in literature… Granted, with film and theater you can do voice-overs or break the fourth-wall (having actors talk directly to the audience)… But generally it is ill-advised to do so, because you're violating the principle of "show, don't tell."
Now, theater is not a perfect model for stopmoes. There's a heavy emphasis on dialogue in theater… Remember that most audience members are going to be 50+ feet away from the actors and only get to see the action from one vantage point. Stopmoes would be well-advised to exploit our ability to provide cinematic close-ups and different camera angles. We should also try to convey information through purely visual means wherever possible -- both because we're working in a more visual medium, and because of how laborious it is to do lipsync.
Despite these caveats, it seems to me that the beginning assumptions of a playwright are most like those of someone writing for stopmo: don't use too many sets or characters, and tell the story purely through observable actions and dialogue.
3. 10-MINUTE PLAYS: SCALE
There is a genre in theater called the "10-minute play." It's been around since the early 70s. There are a number of national competitions, which have subsequently resulted in several book anthologies. "One acts" can easily run a half-hour long -- so 10-minute plays are generally an even shorter form. For most purposes, one page of dialogue is equated to one minute of stage time (cold reading format, not the format you see published in books). Thus, ten minutes = ten pages.
It seems to me that 10 minutes is about as much as most independent, amateur stopmo filmmakers should shoot for in their projects. Consider the following estimates…
Aardman films expects 4 seconds of finished animation per day from their animators. If you work backwards, you can see that the way they arrived at this benchmark was by allowing animators 5 minutes per shot, shooting at 24fps, over the course of an 8-hour work day. Now, if you shoot at 12fps and are maybe a little looser with your poses, you might be able to get 10 seconds per day -- presuming you can put in 8 hours. Working full-time, then you could accomplish roughly one minute of film per week. Ten minutes of film = ten weeks. Basically a quarter year (13 weeks)… Though mind you, that's not counting puppet and set fabrication, lip sync analysis, and the actual scriptwriting.
Still, a ten-minute film in a quarter year sounds excellent. Can't work full time? If you can do 10 hours each weekend, you can still get the project done by year end. Thus, 10-minute plays are a pretty good match for stopmo animators in terms of scale.
4. 10-MINUTE PLAYS: AESTHETIC
Remember Sturgeon's Law: "ninety percent of everything is crap." I've found this to be very much true even in the annual "The Best Ten-Minute Plays" series.
But actually, this is part of what attracted me to the series. I don't want to read an anthology of the best 10-minute plays ever, with all the crap taken out… I want a sense of who the "competition" is right now. I want to know about the overall quality of contemporary playwrights working in this form -- not be bedazzled by the best of the best, whom I have little hope of ever rivaling. I want to learn from failures and triumphs in roughly equal measure.
The "Best Ten-Minute Plays" series I've been reading is also interesting because for each year (since 2004), two books are put out: one for "2 actors," one for "3 or more actors." In my opinion, the plays with 3+ actors tend to be better. Having 3+ characters seems to set up conflict more easily, and prompts more interesting scenarios. Plays with two random strangers who start spouting observations about one another out of the blue -- well, I find them pretty intolerable.
So, suppose you were to take the best of the 10-minute plays and try to do them in stopmo… Would it work?
I've been worrying about this. Part of the unique charm of stopmo is that you can do things that are unrealistic. You can use fantasy monsters, purple characters with ridiculously proportioned anatomy, cartoony physics, etc. I don't want to completely abandon such stuff.
It's not impossible to write some of these things into stage plays, though. As for character design, think about the absurd costumes that Julie Taymor used in "Fool's Fire" -- or the giant puppets she employed in "The Lion King" or "Grendel." Most 10-minute plays are written with black box sets in mind; brevity means that you're probably not going to make a big investment in sets & props. But just because it's uncommon, doesn't mean there's any reason why the 10-minute format inherently prohibits such things.
The thought experiment that finally resolved this question for me: What if I cast one of the 10-minute plays I've written with characters from "Coraline"? I have a play I've written titled "The Buried Piano." Suppose Coraline played "Gina", Coraline's Dad played "Howard", Coraline's mother played "Ellie", and Ms. Forcible played "Ursula"…
Would it work? YES! It's a particular sort of stopmo film -- one that emphasizes character acting -- but that's an aesthetic that's already been established in the world of stop-motion films.
5. WRITING FOR 10-MINUTE PLAYS
This is a topic for a much longer essay -- but I want to at least touch on what I've been learning about playwriting through doing assignments for my "Dramatist's Toolbox" class, taught by Matt Zrebski.
Central Spectacle
Like Jose Rivera, "everything that I write comes from some kind of image." (The Art & Craft of Playwriting, by Jeffrey Hatcher, p.196) I seem to start from "spectacle" -- some image that excites my imagination. Maybe it can be shown on stage, or maybe the actors put it into my head via dialogue… The head of Orpheus kept in a box. A taxidermied whale hanging from the ceiling of a dance club. A buried piano. A nuclear bomb that's been painted with murals.
Finding my central spectacle almost needs to be an illogical process. It's a matter of juxtaposing images collage-style until I find something that really leaps out at me with poetic portent. Understanding why the image "sings" comes later.
Character Generation
You need characters for the play. Generating characters has turned out to be much easier than I expected. A very useful exercise: Go to Google Images and surf around collecting head shots of people… Male, female, young, middle-aged, old, various ethnicities. Print the photos out, one per piece of 8.5x11" paper. Pick one out at random and then spend ten minutes on a free write. Focus most on what they value and what they might desire. It took me about 2 hours to gather 40 faces, and about another 2 hours to generate 10 characters.
Conect-The-Dots
I'm finding that playwriting is largely a matter of "connect-the-dots." You find a central spectacle that you like… You pick a couple of characters that you're attracted to… Now you play the "what if?" game, brainstorming, trying to find scenarios that bring your elements into play with one another.
For me, a really useful tool has been to look for three different interpretations of the central spectacle. For instance: maybe a buried piano is an archeological artifact to put on display; maybe it's a seed that will grow into a piano tree one day; maybe it's the manifestation of a song that's rotting in the ground.
It doesn't matter to me if the interpretations are literally impossible. I find I'm working more or less in the genre of "magic realism". What's most important to me is that my plays convey a sense of poetry and examine how to transform the ugly or banal into the transcendent. [Kinda sounds like an artist's statement, eh?]
Figure out what your climax is before you leave the pre-work phase and start writing the actual play. The climax probably has a strong relationship with your core spectacle. If you don't have a powerful moment to end on, don't even begin!
Refining Characters
Each of the characters in the play must be substantially different from the others. Each should be at least a little eccentric -- including the main character (oddly the person that writers often characterize last).
Each character has to have a literal function in the story world… But, for me, the play really gels when I discover how each character maps onto a different aspect of the theme. For instance, one character sees the buried piano as something to put in the museum, another wants to play it… And so on.
You can create backstory for your characters ad nauseam. However, in practice, you draw on most of that material only infrequently. Story people tend to boil down to just a few key traits. As an exercise, pick just three adjectives that best describe each character.
Figure out who your main character is. When you're juggling 3 or 4 characters, it's easy to forget about this. You don't necessarily have to shout at the audience "this is my main character!" -- but you absolutely need to pick one person. Why? Because what their core need is will determine the "story question" -- and you're going to have to check yourself to make sure that the ending of the story actually answers the question raised at the beginning.
Discovering the Conflicts
Know what each character wants. This is how you develop conflict. Look for ways to make each character's desires incompatible. It can be useful to identify your main antagonist -- but there's no reason why they have to be a "villain," and you may well wind up having several characters who are at odds with the main character. Ex: the piano can't be played right now because there's a party going on, and the state governor's present.
Conflict need not be about personality. Each of your characters can be a nice person, essentially -- it's just that they have a different vision than the protagonist. Wage conflict over possessions. Who possesses the car? Who's in charge of the party? Who has control of the romantic interest? If your main character starts the play in possession of the thing they want, you've got a problem. Either find a way to put the mcguffin in the possession of another character, or choose someone else from your cast to be the main character.
Summary
Story is really only made out of a few elements: the core poetic image/spectacle/theme, characters, conflicting desires, and a good climax. Make sure you have one main character who wants possession of an object/place/tool/person; find reasons why your other characters have a different vision for this mcguffin. Make sure the resolution of the play answers the same question posed at the beginning of the play.
That's about it. Now… Go!
Give me one 10-page script each week for 8-13 weeks. And then pick one of them for your stopmo film. (See where I'm going with all this?)
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: stopmo, writing
March 4, 2009
see "gerald's last day"
by sven at 11:59 pm
Our stopmo friends Justin Rasch and Shel Wagner-Rasch have produced a wonderful film titled Gerald's Last Day.
It was a family effort -- their daughter Aedon does the voice of the little girl, Shel did puppet fab, Justin animated… The film's been winning lots of awards on the festival circuit. As they say, "it couldn't happen to nicer people."
Justin's talent really brings Gerald to life. He makes you feel the poor pup's plight…
For a limited time you can see the film online at the Delta Airlines Fly-In Movie Competition. Please go and give it a gander… And if you like it as much as I do, then give it a vote of five stars to help it win. You don't have to sign up for anything.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: exhibits & events, stopmo
February 10, 2009
coraline's technical innovations in historical context
by sven at 7:00 am
In my opinion, three major technical innovations in the art of stopmo have made Coraline possible: digital cameras/framegrabbers, CNC machining, and the 3D printer.
These relatively new tools are being used to try to solve stopmo's biggest challenge: how do we create puppets with expressive faces?
Whoever comes up with the best answer, leads the art form forward. There is no perfect solution yet -- but I think that Coraline presents the most plausible solution to date.
From King Kong to Jack Skellington
The influence of King Kong (1933) cannot be overestimated. The work of Willis O'Brien lead to the era of grand master Harryhausen, which led to the "hyper-Harryhausen" innovations of Phil Tippett... Three generations of "Dynamation," using stopmo to put photorealistic monsters onscreen with live action.
That lineage effectively came to an end with the release of Jurassic Park in 1993. Hollywood was overzealous in adopting CG monsters; Dynamation almost died out. Stopmo technology has now advanced to a point where a maverick director could make excellent non-ironic use of puppets in a feature monster film. Yet, there are big advantages to doing effects films in an all-digital environment, and one of stopmo's weaknesses is doing swarms of monsters... So it's implausible that the golden age of stopmo monsters (if one ever existed) will return.
However, 1993 was also the year that The Nightmare Before Christmas came out. Technically, it has roots that go back to folks like George Pal and Rankin & Bass -- yet, it was truly a seminal film. Rather than going for photorealism, TNBC embodies visually stylized storytelling. The aesthetic is one of translating 2D illustrations into 3D media.
Along with this new aesthetic has come new technical challenges to conquer. We know a lot about how greenscreen monsters into a live action context (for example) -- but do we know enough about how to make humanoid puppets that can give a full range of emotional expression?
Technical innovations in stopmo since 1993
Corpse Bride and Coraline have both been attempts to build upon and best the innovations of TNBC. Technically, TNBC had puppets with astonishingly tiny joints and it made remarkable use of replacement heads. Corpse Bride was able to take the art further by making use of digital cameras, framegrabbers, and clockwork head technology. Coraline further innovates by using stereoscopic photography, faces produced on a rapid prototyping 3D printer, and armature joints smaller than anything I've ever seen.
What do these innovations mean?
Well, framegrabbers and digital cameras have revolutionized stopmo as a whole. Our ability to create subtle movements, check our work, and delete a frame if a mistake was made... Well, that's huge.
Stereoscopic photography, though? It was beautifully accomplished in Coraline, no question -- but I'm going to feel this technology is a gimmick until there's even the slightest chance that it could become the default for live action filmmakers. I just don't see that ever happening.
Tiny joints are also here to stay, I believe. I can't confirm this, but I think that CNC machining has come a long way since TNBC came out. From photos, it appears to me that armature makers then had to make the majority of their joints one at a time. Now, the standard practice is to outsource making joints to a small parts manufacturing company. Having large supplies of generic joints on hand changes the armaturist's job. It's only on a very special character -- like Oogie Boogie, for instance -- that you're going to see things like universal joints, collet joints, etc. Armaturing now is, for the most part, more about assembly than design.
The big challenge: expressive faces
Where the real "arms race" lies, I believe, is in the technology required to make expressive faces. It's very difficult to do, and I don't think the perfect solution has been found yet.
Corpse Bride's clockwork heads were astonishing... But also profoundly complicated -- far out of the reach of any indy filmmaker. (Though Ron Cole's cable puppets offer a plausible alternative.)
By contrast, creating heads like those in Coraline is not overly complex. There are two main strategies: paddles attached to tiny step-block joints inside the puppet's skull, or resin faces that snap into place with magnets.
Paddles are somewhat prohibitive due to the difficulty of making tiny joints, which are more easily accomplished on a CNC machine. Snap-on faces are most easily created using a 3D printer, but could still be done on a small scale by resculpting a set of identical clay heads and making multiple resin castings. If you had the right tools, neither strategy would be too difficult; yet even without CNC and 3D printing, you can hobble along making things by hand. The only thing that's really out of reach for the solo animator is making thousands of snap-on facial expressions -- and that's really just a function of time/money.
[In an odd way, I find this all very heartening. It was depressing that I couldn't even understand how the Corpse Bride heads worked. As an artist, I felt defeated by the "experts" in my field. With the Coraline puppets, though, I've been excited to realize that I understand what I'm looking at. And I could imagine how one might use this set of strategies to solve specific puppetmaking problems. It's encouraging to think that I could maybe hold my own alongside other puppet fabricators, were I to ever land a job at someplace like Laika.]
Which technology will win out?
I think the Corpse Bride clockwork head technology will be abandoned because it's overly complex. There will only ever be a tiny number of people who understand how to make those heads. It won't be passed on to the next generation... And research and development costs at the outset of a film would always remain high.
Snap-on faces and paddles, on the other hand, are not that complicated if you have access to CNC and 3D printers. It seems likely to me that this technology will catch on and become the future of puppet faces in stopmo feature films.
Yet, snap-on faces are not a perfect solution to the problem. In contrast to paddles, you get exquisite control -- freedom to work out the faces in advance, so that "acting on the head" becomes as mechanical for the animator as following an X sheet for lipsync. But what about those seams between the forehead and the lower face? The folks working on Coraline did a great job of digitally erasing them (in 3D no less!) -- but what a hassle! In some shots you can see that they just decided to leave the seams in (notably on Bobinski).
So, there you have it... Coraline represents the state of the art -- but our art form still has a significant technical problem to resolve: how to best make expressive puppet faces?
ADDENDUM:
Maybe use of 3D printers isn't beyond solo filmmakers after all! I just remembered a link that Shelley Noble sent a few months back, about an online service that does 3D printing called shapeways.com. You send them the file, they send you a 3D plastic object. Price? $2.89 per cubic centimeter of material.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: stopmo
February 8, 2009
coraline puppet technology - with photos!
by sven at 4:43 pm
Thursday night I went to the world premiere of Coraline. There's lots to say about the film itself... What has my mind buzzing, though, is the party at the Portland Art Museum that came afterwards.
To convey to party attendees how much effort went into fabricating Coraline's world, Laika/Focus set up stations around the room where people from different parts of the art department had their actual workbenches and stuff they'd created: hair, painting, armatures, knitting, sewing. Amazingly, we were allowed to ask whatever questions we liked and take photos. ...So you better believe I did!
As an indie stopmo filmmaker, I have a powerful interest in puppet construction. So I'm going to share what I was able to learn or deduce. Click on the photos for larger images.
I think that the world of Coraline was produced at 1:8 scale. That means a 6' tall person would be reproduced as a 9" tall puppet. I estimate that Coraline was 7" tall. Stunt puppets at different scales existed for special purposes -- such as the close-up of the sewing needle during the opening credits. I was told that the doll was scaled up more than 2000% for that shot.
The armatures, were tinier than any I've ever seen. Tie-downs used 4-40 screws -- and that was the largest screw size I saw on any of the armature maps. I recall seeing frequent use of screws labeled 2-56, 1-72 (?) and 0-80. Due to a certain logic inherent in producing step-block joints, it's likely that joints using 4-40 screws also used 1/4" balls. Stainless steel balls are only sold in certain increments: 4/16", 3/16", 2/16", 1/16"... I feel fairly confident that the 0-80 screws were being used in joints that had 1/16" balls and 1/32" rods.
Merrick Cheney down in San Francisco made many of the lead character's armatures. However, it was not uncommon to discover when they arrived in Portland that they would require some retrofitting to fit inside the molds. Most of the armaturists' labor, it sounds like, was a matter of assembling and modifying generic joints. Joints were not being made on premises; the job was outsourced to companies that specialize in small parts manufacturing. Cheney's company produced most of the joints, but there was also another company involved ("Columbia?"). Use of rototools was specifically mentioned with regards to modifying joints for greater range of motion.
Almost exclusively, the only types of joints I saw being used were step-blocks and double-ball sandwich joints. I did see hinges being used for elbows and knees on some puppets, as well as hinge and swivel assemblies for shoulders occasionally. Sometimes the toe of the foot had a hinge. I saw a surprising variety of ankle configurations, which I'd have liked to study further. I had the sense that some of the chest blocks, with built-in neck and spine balls and hinge/swivel shoulders had been created prior to work beginning on Coraline -- stuff that Cheney had on hand.
For 1/16" balls, using the usual jeweler's torch would have fried them -- so a butane microtorch was used instead. A special jig was made to hold rod in place, while another tool would hold the ball on top from shooting off. If a ball popped off while brazing, you'd never find it again.
Safety Silv soldering wire was used (not Stay-Brite or jeweler's "hard" silver solder); the person I spoke to didn't recall which grade. For shining armatures, pickle was used. Someone from the rigging department said that after pickling he'd use a brass wire brush, which wouldn't scratch the stainless steel balls. I'm not sure if this was also common practice among the armature makers.
In general, the armature designs I was seeing didn't offer any big surprises. It appears that a standard design has evolved, which is very much like the example that Lionel Ivan Orozco shares in his Armature Anatomy 101 tutorial.
The really fascinating stuff had to do with how the heads were constructed. I saw two basic types of technology.
One strategy involved creating a hollow resin skull with areas carved away where there would be facial movement (mouth and eyebrows, generally). In these hollow areas, there were little metal paddles attached to tiny step-block joints. There might be one or two paddles for each eyebrow, and then maybe three paddles for the upper lip. The actual face was a silicone sheath that would somehow fit over this skull. The Father and Other Father puppets used this technology.
The other strategy was snap-on faces. Faces were divided into two parts: the forehead, and the rest of the face below the corners of the eyes and bridge of the nose. Seams were removed digitally in post-production using Shake (a software similar to AfterEffects). How they managed to do this and maintain the stereoscopic effect, I have no idea.
I was boggled at how such precision little parts might have been cast from molds... Until I realized (with some certainty) that these pieces all must have been created using rapid prototyping 3D printer technology. The face shapes, then, were surely created using CG modeling software of some sort. ...Whether or not an original physical sculpt was inputted using a 3D scanner is unknown.
There was astonishingly widespread use of magnets for holding different parts of the puppets together. I'd say the magnets were 1/16" diameter neodynium. Each piece of the face might be attached using several magnets. I wondered if the orientation of the magnets mattered, since magnets can repel as well as attract -- but didn't think to ask. Puppets like Coraline and Wybie used the hair and chin lines to their advantage; Bobinski and the cat were different, making use of smile lines to hide seams.
Coraline's eyes were flattened hemispheres that were attached to the skull behind the two-part snap-on face. I was very surprised to see that they were attached using resin joints rather than metal ones. I'm still having trouble figuring out what I saw, but it seemed that the ball-capture plates were attached to the back of the eye, and a ball was attached to the skull. I think the eyes may have actually used plastic universal joints -- but as I said, I'm still confused. Eyelids could rise and lower and had their own separate joint mechanisms in the skull, squashed in with those for the eyes.
Some characters appeared to have K&S plug-ins for eyes. I didn't see any collections of eyes with square-shaped plugs on their backs, so I'm somewhat confused by this. Eyes in general didn't have holes in the retina (as is common for puppets)... So when the animators used sharp things to move them, the eyes were frequently damaged, irritating the folks in charge of fabrication and repair.
The heads generally had squat cylinder-shaped cavities at the base where the neck connection could be concealed. The neck-to-skull connection generally involved square telescoping K&S... But rather than being cast or glued into the skull, I saw steel bits at the base of the skull that allowed you to capture the K&S with a screw.
With the exception of the Other Mother (a special case), I didn't see any jointed hands. Hands were made from thread-wrapped floral wire. I saw one hand design that had a wrist ball attached to a flat palm, which had four screws for capturing the wire fingers, all made from one piece of wire. A threaded tie-down hole was also placed in the palm.
It was impressed upon on me that rigging points in general should never be round -- they should always use telescoping square K&S to prevent the puppet from accidentally rotating around -- as might happen, were you to only use a threaded rod.
Wigs were made from synthetic hair and sometimes mohair. Natural fibers were too subject to expanding and contracting with changes in temperature. All the fibers were hand-dyed. They'd be held together using massive amounts of a hair-styling fluid with the consistency of water, painted on with a brush. It sounded like the wires in the hair were usually thread-wrapped floral wire. Lay down the wire, then lay down the hair on top of it. Pony tails and other large hair sometimes had ball joints hidden inside, for the sake of being animatable. Thus, the hair department sometimes had to collaborate with the armature department.
For certain puppets, aluminum wire was cast inside the silicone skin. This was the case with the scotty dogs and with the melting Other Father's mouth. With the Other Father, The wires didn't form an "O" as one might expect -- they were perpendicular to that.
Both silicone and foam latex were used for puppets. (A bit of a surprise: I recall reading an interview back when "Life Aquatic" came out saying that Selick was never going to use foam again.) Coraline's dad had a silicone head. Forcible and Spink had foam latex bodies... Presumably because such bulky puppets would have been too heavy otherwise.
The folks on this project worked 50 hour weeks during the entire course of the production. One person I spoke to said that this might not be the case if Laika does future feature films. This person thought Laika had learned its lesson: You can work at that pace for a month or two -- but after two years, people were simply too exhausted. It cut down on productivity to the point where 40-hour work weeks may have been just as effective.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (11) | categories: stopmo
January 19, 2009
a theater-based approach to stopmo
by sven at 5:42 pm
During the past year I've been studying how to write novels and plays, how to direct theatrical productions, and different schools of acting... All with the intent to apply what I learn to stopmo. Here are some guiding principles of the approach I've been working out:
A Theater-Based Approach to Stopmo
The filmmaking process is to "develop material through improvisation." This is different from "planning in advance" in that there is an emphasis on working out a final version through successive iterations -- and on finding solutions to problems through creative play.
Practice animating generic puppet "actors" in "black box theater" sets. Try viewing them as your "acting ensemble."
View specially sculpted and cast puppet heads/bodies as "masks" and "costumes."
Practice animating lipsync, blocking, and gestures by using Shakespeare and other play scripts that have entered the public domain.
With original stories, explore all aspects of the story line before drafting a script. Remember: the script frames only a small part of your story world and its timeline.
Work out the story logic in writing prior to creating visual storyboards. It's easier to discover where things don't make sense when you're forced to actually explain why your characters are doing whatever they're doing.
Work "from rough to polished" in developing your shot list. Suggested stages: (a) thumbnail storyboard, (b) post-it storyboard, (c) polished storyboard, (d) story reel [slideshow], (e) 2D animatic [moving 2D elements], (f) photo animatic, (g) pop-thru.
Proof your story via 2D animatic prior to fabricating non-generic puppets and/or sets. No matter how simple you think your film is, it will take far less time to preview what your story is going to look like by using drawings than to construct and and film it in 3D. (Compare this to how actors do a "read-through" and a "walkthrough" when producing a play.)
Voice track dictates animation; it sets the timing.
Proof your gestures & lipsyncs using pop-thrus and sequenced sets of headshots. (Compare this to doing rehearsals for a play.)
Proof lipsync separately from gestures/blocking. ...And be sure to double-check the viseme analysis when you have the final puppet "mask" with its particular set of mouth shapes.
Strive to create puppet characters that have unique personalities -- not enigmatic anonymity.
To understand a puppet character: Get their voice in your head by writing first-person narratives from their POV. Explore their posture, habitual gestures, style of walk, and way of doing simple activities by acting these things out with your own body.
Do not rely on "costume" as the primary indicator of character.
Make many quick clay "sketches" (maquettes) when developing character "costumes." Ceramic clay is the 3D equivalent of the pencil: it's the fastest and cheapest way to rough out ideas.
Do the final character sculpt prior to making the puppet's armature. Use a throw-away wire armature for building the sculpt.
When animating a performance, work pose-to-pose. Use the pop-thru "rehearsal" as reference.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: stopmo
November 2, 2008
impromptu stopmo film fest
by sven at 1:52 am
Yesterday was my birthday: number 37. Naturally, we threw a party. :)
After folks got tired of playing "Uno," I decided to curate an impromptu stopmo film fest. The intent was to present a survey of different types of puppets, stopmo methods, and aesthetic traditions. Here's what I showed:
1. The Potato Hunter
By Timothy Hittle - 1991. I started out by explaining that there are three main types of puppet construction: clay, foam build-up, and puppets cast from foam latex or silicone. Hittle's "Jay Clay" films ("The Potato Hunter" and "Canhead") nicely demonstrate a clay puppet in action. I drew everyone's attention to the poses: Hittle creates the clearest silhouettes of any stopmoe I've every seen. You can really see his 2D training showing through.
2. Balance
By Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein - 1989 (7:40). Here's a nice example of puppets created using the foam build-up method. An Academy Award winner. "Very German," folks said. I could have shown the original King Kong as an example of build-up, but monster films have generally used cast foam latex puppets, so I didn't want to confuse matters.
3. Madame Tutli-Putli
2007 (17:21). An Academy Award nominee. I think Suzie Templeton's "Peter and the Wolf" won in 2007? An example of a cast silicone puppet -- with innovative use of live-action eyes composited onto the face. Folks were a bit mystified by what the film meant. I gave my best attempt at interpretation... But I don't think I've nailed it yet.
4. Creature Comforts
1989 (6 min). Three films without dialogue in a row... So I decided to throw this in next. Creature Comforts won an Oscar, and spawned several TV shows -- both in the UK and in the US (briefly). If I recall my lore correctly, Nick Park was up for an award for Wallace and Gromit the same year, which really catapulted him to the world stage. I talked about how you do lip synch with clay puppets by having an array of replacement mouths on hand. I pointed out that clay puppets are the easiest type of puppet to construct -- but the hardest to animate, because you constantly have to resculpt.
5. John Henry and the Inky Poo
One of George Pal's Puppetoons. All the shorts I'd shown so far use displacement animation -- where you pose a bendable/malleable puppet. I wanted to show an example of replacement animation, where you replace the entire puppet for each shot. John Henry wasn't the short I meant to show folks to demonstrate this point -- but interestingly, it generated the most discussion.
6. The Philips Broadcast of 1938
Another of George Pal's Puppetoons. This one focuses on dancing puppets, and you can see how they were constructed from wood, often using a lathe. There's a segment in this short of a black Christian revival meeting where a large group of puppets are doing the "wave" in a circle. That bit continues to blow my mind...
7. The Hand
By Jiri Trnka (18 min). Riffing on Pal's use of wooden puppets, I went backwards in time to Czechoslovakia's most famous master puppet animator. I felt this was probably his best known film (in the English-speaking world), and talked a little about how Eastern European artists have sometimes slipped anti-authoritarian messages into their art... Trnka in particular payed a price for this, getting banned from the studios for several years.
[BREAK]
8. Brother
By Adam Elliot (8 min). Elliot's feature film, "Harvie Krumpet," is another Acadamy Award winner. I thought after our break it would be nice to have something light and humorous to get back into the swing of things... Completely forgetting how grim this film actually is. I explained how Elliot spent a number of years airbrushing T-shirts at an Australian equivalent of Portland's Saturday Market.
9. Hamilton Mattress
2001. I wanted to show a good example of high quality foam latex puppets. "Hamilton Mattress," while a bit long, is a heck of a lot of fun and beautifully produced. Barry Purves, author of "Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance," directed. Purves also worked on the "Wind in the Willows" TV series, which has similarly excellent puppets -- but is paced much slower.
10. The Great Escape
By yours truly - 2006. Some folks had to leave... So before they did, I figured I ought to show them one of my own films. I shudder at some of the technical flaws now -- but people do laugh at it, so it's all good.
[BREAK]
11. Street of Crocodiles
By the Brothers Quay - 1986 (21 min). I felt like I was going to be doing stop-motion a disservice if I didn't show at least one short either by Jan Svankmajer or the Quays. I pointed out that where the brothers were animating meat, moving something pointedly dead, they were actually reanimating objects. I also talked a bit about the Quay's philosophy of finding the non-human spirit in their assemblage creatures, rather than anthropomorphizing dolls.
12. Aria
By Pjotr Sapegin. This seemed like the perfect short to end on. The music and story are beautiful and haunting... And then the last scene, where the puppet commits suicide by dissembling itself, unscrewing it's own armature... Well, the puppet that's aware of it's own puppet-ness somehow seemed just right.
13. the end of the show
By Don Hertzfeldt. Not stopmo. But this little statement about the seriousness of animation as an artform -- interrupted by a ball of fluff shouting "ROBOTS!" and a battle with laser guns... Well, it's just about the best possible way to end ANY animation fest, imho.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (8) | categories: stopmo
October 30, 2008
q&a with richard williams and some stopmo pros
by sven at 11:59 pm
Tonight Cascade ACM SIGGRAPH and ASIFA Portland hosted an evening with celebrated animator Richard Willams. Williams is most famous for his work on "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and is the author of the essential book, The Animator's Survival Kit.
Williams learned from the likes of Chuck Jones and several of Disney's "Nine Old Men" -- people who literally invented the principles of animation that we use today. Knowledge that would have otherwise been lost has been passed down to the current generation of animators because of his efforts.
Williams showed clips from a new set of instructional DVDs he's peddling and mostly responded to questions. He's charming to listen to -- but I didn't feel like the questions that people asked tonight really tapped into his wisdom very deeply. Still, I was glad to go.
For me, the real thrill came afterwards: when my stopmo friend Hazel Malone introduced me to Misha Klein. Having seen clips of Klein's excellent work-in-progress, The Hallway, and various TV shows that he's worked on (Celebrity Death Match, The PJs, Robot Chicken, Moral Orel), I was kinda starstruck.
I also got to meet Anthony Scott a second time, and several other folks from Laika who've just finished working on Coraline. Having just seen Richard Williams speak, it was the perfect moment to ask some technical questions I've been hanging onto about how stopmo professionals work.
Suzanne (who's last name I didn't get!) did most of the answering. Here's my best recollection:
Q: Do you use "breaking of joints" in stopmo?
It depends on the armature mostly. But to an extent, yes, pro stopmoes are thinking in terms of breaking of joints. (Example: Bending the elbow of an arm in an unrealistic direction to increase the illusion of fluidness as the arm swings. See p.231 of Survival Kit.)
Q: Do you shoot at 24fps even when working on TV shows?
Usually yes -- but it depends on the studio. Most animation studios doing TV shows will shoot 24fps, then use 2:3 pulldown to convert to video's 29.97fps format. A few do shoot at 30fps or 15fps... "But who wants to shoot those extra frames?"
As I knew before, 24fps is standard for film work. The folks I was speaking to weren't sure about what the standard would be now that we're switching to digital TV transmissions -- but I feel confident, based on my research, that we're moving to a 24fps standard for TV too.
So, it sounds like pro stopmoes can do 15fps or 30fps if forced to... But anyone who's learning the art should learn to think in 24fps.
Q: Do you shoot on a combo of 1s and 2s, or usually just on 1s (or just 2s)?
In film work, you're generally shooting on 1s -- but yes, sometimes you'll mix in 2s where appropriate (e.g. really slow moves). Stopmo for TV is generally shot on 2s because the schedule and budget are tight.
(I know that stopmo luminary Nick Hilligoss is a big advocate of shooting on 1s... But I was astonished a year or two back when I realized that Justin Rasch shoots a mix of 1s and 2s depending on the action. From what I've seen, it looks like mostly 2s -- but with 1s for fast actions like runs. ...Hey Justin -- did I get that right?)
Q: I know that stopmo is inherently straight-ahead -- but do you use anything like pop-thrus to establish keyframes?
Yes. Apparently the folks I spoke to would do a "mock-thru" at 1 pose per 10 frames to get the timing -- and then a "rehearsal" at 1 pose per 4 frames.
Q: Are rehearsals just for the sake of the "suits" -- or are they valuable for you, too?
They're valuable for the animator, too. If you're going to spend two weeks on a shot, it's really helpful to get to go through it beforehand and find your marks.
A word about the value of good armatures.
I showed off some photos of armatures I've made, and heard some feedback about ball'n'socket armatures in general... The opinion was that they're simply crucial to doing top-notch animation, and that a puppet is basically only as good as its armature.
I pointed out that with framegrabbers nowadays, you can get by with a wire armature if the film is going to be short -- say, 2 minutes or less. Yes, I heard, but if you're going to be doing repeated motions (like mock-thrus & rehearsals) then a B&S armature is really indispensable.
No one likes fighting with wire's spring back... And everyone in the business has had to finish out shots with a broken puppet.
(A few nights ago I rewatched The Sandman on YouTube and was struck by how B&S pups have their own unique quality of movement. Even when framegrabbers are used, the motion just feels different when you've got pivot joints underneath the foam.)
I came home totally buzzed. I got some questions answered by the pros I look up to -- and may have a chance to hang out a bit more at some future date. Man, I'd love the chance to get involved in some of these folks' personal side projects!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (5) | categories: stopmo
October 20, 2008
stopmo sketchbook: ball bounce
by sven at 10:39 pm
A little stopmo clip I made over the weekend.
I like the idea of creating clips as if they were drawings in a 4-dimensional sketchbook. This is a first step in that direction.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (5) | categories: stopmo
July 28, 2008
new stopmo demo clip
by sven at 7:00 am
There's a job opening at Laika right now for assistant animators. I'm applying.
Most of my animation so far has been character-driven... So to round things out a bit, I put together some clips of inanimate objects.
The work was done last week over the course of two days. The forest set was recycled, but everything else was made from scratch (including the flower).
I probably could have squeezed out another clip in the time I allotted myself... But at the beginning I got unnecessarily bogged down with hi-def workflow. It was taking 40 sec to capture a frame -- and then, later, 60 sec to translate RAW format to jpg. After the first project was done, I downgraded to a DV video capture workflow -- which made things go much more speedily.
I did my first significant work with rigging and rig-removal. Obviously it was necessary for the leaf. But surprisingly, the red ball needed a rig too. I couldn't find another way to keep it from rolling away from me that didn't also make the ball impossible to animate precisely. The rig wound up acting like an axle.
Lesson learned, though: A white background will show every little mismatch between your clean plate and the frame you're PhotoShopping. Not fun.
I'm excited about the leaf clip. It's the closest I think I've come to translating my 2D aesthetics to 3D. It has my brain burbling with new possibilities.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (12) | categories: stopmo
March 20, 2008
gnome puppet - tease
by sven at 7:00 am
Two weeks ago I was working on a puppet that you saw bits of last year. I had been hoping to hit the March 31 deadline for the StopMoShorts.com stopmo haiku challenge.
What was I thinking?! All my time needs to be going toward getting Let Sleeping Gods Lie done! So, the project's back on hold.
But I figured I give you a little tease. ;-)
The gnome's body is being sculpted in Chavant NSP. The idea is to cast it in foam latex.
The head is a resin casting. It's detachable; there's a K&S plug-in in the neck.
I shaved off the lower jaw with an X-acto blade. I created a new lower jaw using Magic Sculp epoxy clay, which attaches using two 1/8" brass pins. The idea is to sculpt several further lower jaws, so the pup can do lip-sync.
My most ambitious puppet yet. And I'm just aching with frustration, knowing that I mustn't spend time on it until... Well, the H.P. Lovecraft Filmfest submission deadline this year is August 15. Could be as long as that.
Oh -- And the tree... The tree in the background is plaster over insulation foam, with a wash of acrylic paint. Something that I made at a plaster workshop led by Stephanie Lee, which I attended in February.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (3) | categories: stopmo
March 19, 2008
What makes a great stopmo film?
by sven at 7:00 am
[I wrote this on 2/22 in response to this thread at SMA. Seemed worth cross-posting.]
What makes a great stopmo film?
I think there are (at least) two competing meanings for the word "great" here. On the one hand, "great" might mean "excellently made" -- good puppets, smooth animation, a delicious color palette and intriguing forms... On the other hand, "great" might mean "serious art" -- the sort of stories that get published in collections of "the world's greatest animation," etc.
I want to try to say something about stopmo that aspires to being "serious art."
STOPMO STORIES' MOST COMMON ELEMENTS
I did a quick survey of my stopmo DVD shelf, asking "what elements do these films have in common?" What I found was that the vast majority use stopmo to accomplish a fairly limited number of effects. These include:
- dinosaurs - Lost World; Beast from 20,000 Fathoms; Planet of the Dinosaurs
- dragons / mythological monsters - Jack the Giant Killer; Clash of the Titans; Dragonslayer
- modern horror monsters - The Thing; 7 faces of Dr. Lao; Nightmare Before Christmas (not necessarily scary monsters)
- space aliens - Star Wars holo-chess; Jason of Star Command; First Men In The Moon
- robots - Robo-Jox; RoboCop; AT-AT Walkers; Star Crash
- skeletons - Jason and the Argonauts; Corpse Bride
- insects - The Cameraman's Revenge; James and the Giant Peach; MTV's Monster Island
- talking animals - Wind in the Willows; Creature Comforts
- living toys - Starewicz's 'The Mascot'; Robot Chicken; Domokun
- inanimate objects moving - Street of Crocodiles; the works of PEZ
- morphing - The Adventures of Mark Twain
- rubbery cartoon-style people - George Pal's Puppetoons
- stringless marionettes / puppets - Trnka's 'The Hand'
When I go down this list, what I see is that most of these elements force a story into a genre: science fiction / fantasy, children's, or comedy.
What is a "genre" film? One that has certain guaranteed elements that the target market expects when they purchase your product. A western, for instance, has to have cowboys, horses, six-shooters, and hats. A murder mystery has to have a murder that gets solved. A romantic comedy winds up with the protagonists essentially getting married.
Frustratingly, genre stories are almost never considered serious art. There are a few interesting exceptions, where genre stories transcend -- but more about that later.
ELEMENTS OF THE "SERIOUS ART" GENRE
I recently watched the new "Animation Show of Shows" DVD sets. The DVDs have some pure comedy pieces mixed in -- but there's also a high proportion of "serious art" shorts. When I consider them as a group, what I see is that "serious art" is essentially a genre itself -- you just have to recognize what the "marketable" elements are in this case:
- the familial life cycle - children losing their parents and becoming parents themselves
- the sexual life cycle - being born, falling in love, having sex, procreating
- aging - how approaching death shifts perspective
- loss / grieving for the departed
- embracing / avoiding one's own death
- questioning the nature of death / afterlife
- creation myth re-tellings
- coming of age - taking charge of one's destiny
- being a part of war-making
- technology vs. nature
- Freudian / Jungian divisions of the psyche
If your animation project deals with one of these themes, you're pretty much automatically in the realm of "serious art." It almost seems unfair, realizing that there's a formula...
TRANSCENDING GENRES
Now, returning to films that transcend genre... I think King Kong (1933), Star Wars, and Suzie Templeton's Peter & the Wolf are more than just a Giant Monster movie, a Space Opera, and a Children's Fable.
Why? Well, the original Kong is a psyche story, where Kong is the stand-in for masculine libido. (Peter Jackson, really screwed up this aspect of the story, which imho is part of why his film didn't work nearly as well as the original.) Star Wars has amazing spectacle -- but it's really the spiritual element of Zen vs. Technology that gives us a compelling world view. Suzie Templeton -- well, everything that she's done is just dripping with Freudian psychology.
...
So, what makes a great stopmo film? Here's my answer: Yes, pay attention to the technical and artistic details of good filmmaking... But if you want a shot at being considered "serious art," then take care when choosing your theme. Pick one that makes a broad statement about human nature / the human condition.
That is, if the "serious art" market is who you're really moved to speak to.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (0) | categories: stopmo
March 18, 2008
halfway between puppetry and puppetfilms: pop-thru animation
by sven at 7:00 am
Wrote this last week Sunday (3/09) when the idea was burning a hole in my brain. Probably not as cool as I thought in the heat of the moment -- but still worth sharing. Sorry there's no accompanying video clip yet.
Sometimes I wish I could use stopmo as if it were a 4th-dimensional sketchbook... Quickly and loosely "sketching" sculptures into existence that could then move on their own...
I'm thinking that maybe pop-thrus could help accomplish this wish.
What if a pop-thru were then presented as if it's a complete film? Based on a few related films that I've seen, and on how people relate to live puppetry, I suspect the audience would look past the flaws and accept it.
But would other stopmoes accept rough and stuttery pop-thrus as "real" stop-motion animation? Case in point, would StopMoShorts.com accept a film that looks like this?
I think I could make a strong case that pop-thru animation should be considered a legitimate form of puppetfilm -- that it just uses a very stylized form of motion.
When I look at the broader context, it seems to me that pop-through animation could do something interesting. Puppetfilms exist on a continuum halfway between live puppetry and traditional hand-drawn animation... Exploring pop-thru animation could push stopmoes more toward thinking of themselves as puppeteers, rather than animators.
Exploring unfamiliar territory like that has just got to produce some interesting results...
1. THE PROBLEM: STOPMO TAKES A LOT OF TIME
Puppet animation takes a lot of time. Building the Professor Ichbonnsen puppet for my last film took 24 hours. When you add in building the set, recording the script, animating, and doing post-production, then I'm sure it took 3-4 times that long to produce the final 30 second clip.
I'm OK with that. I like pouring focused attention energy into art. But there are also times when I wish I could produce my visual ideas more quickly. I fantasize about stopmo being more like my sketchbooks... More like throwing ideas out fast and furious with a pencil and paper.
It's hard to take risks and grow as an artist if every experiment is so expensive.
True, I can explore ideas pretty quickly by drawing storyboards... But it's not really satisfying. It's not three-dimensional; the sense of forms, volumes, and space that I see in my head don't translate.
So I'm on a quest. I want to find ways to make stopmo feel more like sketchbooking. ...Not as the only thing I do -- but as one available option.
2. FINDING A NEW FAST AND EXPRESSIVE STYLE
So, quest in mind, I set myself a goal: Find a way to build a puppet in one hour. It's OK if it's rough around the edges -- but it has to be actually functional for animation.
Here's the result. It took two hours to build -- but still, that's pretty good. And what's more, I genuinely like the look. The deliberately rough-hewn edges feel like they've got life in them.
With some initial success, now I'm thinking: How can I animate my puppet in a way that's equally fast... But which still captures the essential ideas of my vision?
There's an obvious answer: Do a pop-thru.
A pop-thru is an exercise pro-animators sometimes do, where they photograph their key poses but leave out all the inbetweens. It's usually only done during feature productions, when demanded by the director -- it's not something anyone usually keeps around for it's own sake.
But what if you did? What if you treated a pop-thru as your final product? I've experimented with films told through a series of still photographs, and they seem to work OK. And I've seen a few short segments on TV that do the same thing. If there's a worthwhile story, the audience seems to be pretty darned forgiving about how it's presented.
I think to myself: YES -- this is what a "stopmo sketch" must look like. It's not just "test" -- you can do a whole story in this style. And it's not necessarily sloppy -- you can put focus into choosing strong poses. I think artistically, this could really work!
3. IS IT ANIMATION?
Using pop-thru animation would make it much more feasible to get a short done in time for the March 31 StopMoShorts.com "stopmo haiku" challenge. And when I think about submitting pop-thru animation, it excites me... Because it feels like it could expand people's horizons about what can be done with stopmo. But I also anticipate a backlash: people feeling that what I've done isn't actually "real" animation.
Not real animation? When I look at the tools that I'm using, the pop-thru is almost identical to any other stopmo film. I'm using gestures, key frames, X-sheets, puppets that have no visible connection to a puppeteer... Really the only difference here is that I've eliminated the inbetweens.
Perhaps someone will suggest that it's not really animation -- it's pixilation.
I think I'd disagree with this. The quintessential pixilated film has to be Norman McLaren's classic, "Neighbors." How is pixilation used in this film? Live actors are shot in static poses which then get strung together into a film. They pop around as if being filmed by time-lapse photography -- although the critical difference there, I believe, is that the camera's shutter is not being triggered on an automatic time-schedule -- the director has as much time as they need to pose each shot.
A pop-thru isn't made using live actors who can pose themselves -- there has to be an animator involved, putting the puppets into their positions. So, I'm inclined to think that a pop-thru isn't "true" pixilation; a pop-thru is simply a pop-thru.
It is its own unique thing -- and it is animation. It requires an animator and an animator's tools. What else could it be?
4. BUT CAN WE ACCEPT IT AS LEGITIMATE STOPMO?
Even if people are willing to accept that the pop-thru is really a form of animation, I expect there may still be some resistance to accepting it as legitimate stopmo.
Why? Because the inbetweens are missing? I think there are some relevant precedents worth looking at...
In the realm of traditional hand-drawn animation, there's what's called "limited animation." Hanna-Barbera is a good example of this style. Constrained by budgets, animation houses were forced to stop drawing every frame of a cartoon, and instead used a lot of "talking head" shots and recycled walk sequences.
I've noticed that animation festivals sometimes accept shorts from 2D animators where it's just their pencilling -- no inking or coloring has been done. These shorts don't look "finished" -- but they're entertaining and worth watching as-is, nonetheless.
I think about the Academy Award-winning "Harvie Krumpet" and Adam Elliot's other stopmo works -- which for the most part are shots of the main character standing still.
Limited animation, unpolished animation, and animation that has a lot of still shots -- these all, nonetheless, generally aspire toward a sense of realism. Pop-thrus break with realism more noticeably, due to their stuttery rhythm.
But there are different aesthetics for motion. Ray Harryhausen aimed at a photo-realistic smoothness... Robot Chicken aims for exaggerated "pop"... And what about the Brothers Quay? They have a uniquely non-realistic approach to motion (e.g. the blurry skeletons in "Frida") -- yet no one would suggest that what they do is not proper stopmo.
My conclusion is that though pop-thru animation may look relatively "unfinished" and stuttery, it properly belongs to the family of stop-motion puppet animation. It simply has its own unique aesthetic for motion.
5. THE AUDIENCE PARTICIPATES IN BRINGING PUPPETS TO LIFE
Let me take an unexpected turn now, for the sake of explaining why I think pop-thrus' motion aesthetic can work with an audience.
Puppet animation requires skills from many different art forms: sculpting, puppet-making, model-making, photography, acting, animation...
I think puppetfilms' closest relatives, though, are hand-drawn animation and puppetry. I think you could say that there's a continuum between these two extremes, and puppet animations sits right there in the middle.
I find this interesting: Stopmoes, we call ourselves "animators" -- not "puppeteers." But we could just as well call ourselves puppeteers, since our acting has to be transfered through our puppets... For that matter (to a lesser extent) puppeteers could call themselves animators -- since they invest life into inanimate puppet beings.
So, how are live puppetry and puppet animation really different?
Well, the most obvious difference is that that stopmoes manipulate their puppets during the invisible space between frames of film. From the audience's point of view, we are physically divorced from our puppets in a way that live puppeteers never can be.
But I think there's something more than this. When I think about all the different types of puppetry... Marionettes, Muppets, sock puppets, ventriloquist dummies, giant Bread and Puppets figures, Indian shadow puppets, and so on... What I notice is that the illusion of reality requires a greater suspension of disbelief.
Puppeteers may mask their presence by dressing in black, or hiding below the proscenium of the puppet stage -- but to forget that they are there, the audience must willingly play along. Skilled puppeteers can create stunning subtlety in their performances -- and yet, few puppets can actually capture a full range of human emotions on their faces. The audience participates in bringing the characters to life, using their imaginations to help isolate and animate the story.
This is what I'm asking the audience of pop-thru animation to do. Here's the deal: I'll give you the key poses -- you use your imagination to fill in the inbetweens for me.
I think this can work... Puppet shows don't seem to suffer from presenting imperfect illusions of reality -- if the story's interesting, the show's a hit. The same should be true for pop-thrus.
6. EXPLORING THE BORDERLANDS BETWEEN PUPPETRY AND PUPPETFILMS
If there is a continuum between live puppetry and hand-drawn animation, then stopmo puppetfilms sit squarely between the two. If we try to place pop-thru films on the same continuum, then I think they fall halfway between live puppetry and puppetfilms.
An illustration might help here. Imagine a continuum that runs from 1 to 9. Here's where I'm suggesting these art forms would fall on it:
- hand-drawn animation
- stopmo puppetfilms
- pop-thru animation
- live puppetry
There's plenty enough to learn if you just want to become good at stopmo. But I think it's well worthwhile for the serious stopmoe to also make forays into the the realms of hand-drawn animation and live puppetry.
Back during the 1930s, the animators at Disney discovered and articulated core principles of animation: squash and stretch, secondary motion, follow-through, etc. In the world of of animation -- hand-drawn, flash, CG, stopmo -- no one surpasses the understanding of motion mechanics that the pencil-pushers have attained. We would be wise to learn from them.
Puppetry, on the other hand, has life and vitality to it that is difficult to feel in oneself one frame at a time. Live puppeteers strive to be actors -- but unlike live action actors, the performance has to be channeled through an inert figure made of wood, foam, wire, and cloth. Because puppeteers don't have to also simultaneously struggle with animating, they've made strides in the art of expressiveness that stopmoes generally take longer to discover. Once again, we would be wise to learn from this other realm.
There are arenas where setting hard lines between art forms is necessary. For instance, the question of whether or not motion-capture constitutes animation has bearing on who's allowed to compete for a "best animation" Oscar this year...
But in the realm of creativity, exploring the borderlands between neighboring artistic nations should be encouraged. Digging around in the gray areas between black and white will surely lead to unusual discoveries -- which have the potential to re-enrich our native traditions.
On the grandest scale, this is part of what I think pop-thru animation has the potential to do.
I want to take what has been a mere exercise, and expand it to become a full-fledged style of animation...
Pop-thru animation may look rough, it may look stuttery -- but I think it can open up a freedom for me to explore sculptural forms and story ideas that I would not otherwise risk investing in.
I'm thinking this out loud, because I want to open this exploration up as a possibility for other animators as well. What I see in pop-thrus that could benefit me -- maybe it could be useful to you too.
Let's call it legit and find out.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (7) | categories: stopmo
February 13, 2008
new technologies' effects on stop-motion animation
by sven at 7:00 am
(Another essay-like post that I've written for the pose-to-pose stopmo thread at StopMotionAnimation.com.)
I want to try to sum up a bunch of thinking I've been doing about how new technologies are affecting stop-motion animation.
THE TECHNOLOGY OF FILMING STOPMO ANIMATION
It seems to me that three technologies have really revolutionized how we work:
- the framegrabber
- the ability to capture digital frames
- the personal computer
I want to emphasize that early framegrabbers, such as the Lunchbox, were built to work with analog frame capture -- film-based movie cameras and tape-based videocams. Now that we're capturing frames with Digital Still Cameras and DV cams, most folks have software-based framegrabbers operating on their computers... But framegrabber tech is not inherently dependent on personal computers.
The personal computer, I'd say, has optimized the use of framegrabbers and digital image capture. Ideally, a computer will fulfill four functions:
- previewing what a DSC/DV cam sees before you snap a frame
- triggering the DSC/DV cam, so we don't have to risk touching it
- storing the images captured
- compiling many frames into a single file that can be played as a movie
There are ways to accomplish all four of these functions without involving a computer -- but it tends to be a much more difficult route. Newer framegrabber programs, such as Dragon, are attempting to integrate the four functions in a very stream-lined way... I think there's good reason to hope that Dragon is establishing a standard that future softwares will emulate.
THE ANIMATOR'S WORK-FLOW
Here are the major ways that I see new technologies affecting how animators do their work:
1. With framegrabbers, less mental focus is required.
Before framegrabbers existed, animators had to essentially become "human framegrabbers"... Going into an intense state of "animation hypnosis," where the world slows down to "puppet time," and one almost sees the arcs traced by a puppet's limbs as tracer-lines floating in mid-air. With the aide of framegrabbers, you don't necessarily have to go into such a deep state of concentration. This is both a good and a bad thing. On the one hand, it greatly relieves stress on the animator -- you're more able to take bathroom breaks and recover from lapses of attention while shooting. On the other hand, profound concentration was a crucible that forged the greatest masters of our art. Without the constraint of having to "do it all in your head," it's easier to produce lazy-but-tolerable performances.
2. With digital image capture, you get unlimited takes.
Film stock and developing is expensive. Digital frames, on the other hand, cost essentially nothing. Don't feel that your last shot was up-to-snuff? No problem! Shoot again -- the only cost is time.
3. We can rehearse with the puppet's body, not just our own.
When you only had one chance to shoot an animation sequence, rehearsing had to be done either by drawing thumbnail poses or by acting out the sequence with your own body. These are still extremely valuable tools. But now we have an additional tool: shooting test frames using the puppet itself -- with the very camera that we'll use for the final shoot, locked-off at the same angle. This is very handy... Often times a puppet's body has limitations that our own bodies don't. Being able to rehearse using the puppet itself gives us the most accurate information possible when we want to test our acting ideas.
4. Different acting ideas can be tested quickly using pop-throughs.
Back when animation could only be accomplished using film cameras, pop-throughs were a luxury that only film studios could conceivably afford. That's changed. Now, essentially anyone who's using a digital/computer workflow can do a pop-through -- for no added financial cost, and using far less time than a full-blown take. Better yet, pop-throughs can be created non-linearly, being assembled out of photos that were taken in no particular sequence during a visual brainstorming session. Presumably, having more options to choose from will give us a better end product.
THE CULMINATIVE EFFECT
Working at home, the solo animator is always both an actor and a director.
As an actor, the animator has to try to get inside the mind of their character and deliver a performance. The puppet is just a very small costume. Like a stage actor, the animator tries to embody certain emotions and tries to hit a few planned gestures at certain points in time... And similarly, there will always be an element of improvisation in the actual moment-to-moment doing of the performance.
As a director, the animator is concerned with planning blocking, gestures, and expressions. As Marshall Mason wrote in Creating Life on Stage, "A director is a sculptor of motion..." At a certain level, improvisation never goes away -- but it can be vastly limited.
So, we are always both actor and director -- but the more exploit these new digital/computer tools, the more the balance shifts toward us being directors.
Ultimately, stopmo is always a "straight-ahead" process... But the technology now allows us to emphasize choreography more than ever before. Stop-motion can actually become quite like 2D animation: using pop-throughs as reference (possibly even rotoscoping them), we can just about establish keyframes -- and then plan our inbetweens with pre-determined spacing charts.
Think about it: Where do you fall on the continuum right now? Are you more an actor-animator -- or a director-animator?
Perhaps even more importantly: Where do you personally find fun in the animation process? Is your joy more in living inside the puppet, moment-to-moment? Or is joy for you in the development process that happens before the camera starts shooting?
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: stopmo
February 12, 2008
the director-animator
by sven at 7:00 am
(A note-worthy comment that I made on this thread at StopMotionAnimation.com.)
"If for example your puppet is to laugh in reaction to something, you conjure that feeling inside yourself in order to portray it through the puppet.It's that same sort of thing in animation, only slower."
Ah! This comment helped me a lot, Ron. Yes: that sense of finding a feeling in yourself and using it to express something through the puppet is a core part of the performance. No matter what else I'm doing when I'm animating, there's still always going to be some part of me that is engaged in this very intuitive, organic, improvisational approach.
BUT, let me now propose a distinction. If there can be an Animator-Actor, then there can also be an Animator-Director.
ACTORS VS. DIRECTORS
Think about the division of labor between actors and directors in theater. (Acting and directing for film is pretty different in a number of ways, so set that aside for the moment.) Her are some observations in broad strokes...
An actor's concern is revealing character. A director's concern is telling story.
An actor creates their performance out of a script, blocking, gestures, and expressions. On top of these observable things, though, they also add emotion, motivation, meaning, and an energetic awareness of the other actors whom they're interacting with.
A director creates their version of a story by suggesting blocking, gestures, motivations... If the actors are good, then the director doesn't have to micromanage. On the other hand, if they're working with beginning actors, the director might have to get very specific about things such as cheating poses to the audience, explaining to actors what motivates their character to "pick up this ball, which reminds you of your childhood" -- and so on.
DIRECTOR-ANIMATOR METHODS
When we're solo animators, not working in a studio, then we get to be both actors and directors at the same time. And yet, there is still a fundamental difference in approach. It seems to me that an actor works from the inside-out -- whereas a director works from the outside-in. (E.g. finding poses that will communicate an emotion, rather than emotions which will communicate no matter what action you do.)
I strongly suspect that I am a Director-Animator more than I'm an Actor-Animator. Sort of like how I know that I'm more of a Fabricator-Animator than a Motion-Animator. (Or a Set Builder-Animator, as castlegardener has identified himself.)
When you're directing live human beings on a stage, you can make suggestions -- but the performances are ultimately up to them. Directing puppets, I have a profound level of control... It can almost be like being a dance choreographer! You can choreograph blocking, gestures, expressions to a phenomenal extent with puppets... My sense is that you could assemble pretty great performances out of these elements, without having to experientially go very deep into the puppet's head.
DIFFERENT TYPES OF DIRECTORS
I'm going to go a step farther, and suggest that there are different types of theater directors too, depending upon what kind of play is being staged. For instance, if you stage something like Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," you're probably going to use a fairly melodramatic style. Something more modern, like Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is going to be more naturalistic.
Myself, well, given what I've done so far, it looks to me like my innate directing style may be musical theater. In my Professor Ichbonnsen clip, I'm pairing up gestures with words and phrases -- which is what you do when you have actors who are singing. (It's kind of like what the 2D animators call "Mickey Mousing," where you have the characters bouncing in time with the beat of the music.)
If I know that this is my directorial style, it allows me to consciously alter it for good effect. For instance, rather than hitting all my cues with full energy, I can pull the punches for a more subtle performance. Or, I can intentionally choose physical actions that contradict what the character is saying with their dialogue, to create a more sophisticated meaning.
DEVELOPING THE PERFORMANCE
It's all very nice, of course, that I'm getting a grip on what my own preferences are... Where this might be useful for other folks, though, is in looking at how we develop our performances.
What I think I'm hearing from most folk is that they imagine what they want their character to do, they act it out a few times, and then they animate.
The types of theater directors that I find exciting (from reading and hearing speakers) seem to be the ones who put their actors through exercises to discover more information that can be channeled into the actual play.
Here's an example from the book "Julie Taymor: Playing With Fire":
"She devoted the early rehearsals to finding ideographs -- essential, emblematic gestures. Her Prospero, Robert Stattel, looked for the movement that captured despair at the loss of one's library, one's source of knowledge, pleasure, and power. His ideograph -- holding his hands together like a book, which then opened like a door, leaving him outside -- used literal images to heighten the sense of his loss when those pictures dissolved. Ferdinand and Miranda searched for expressions of the discovery of physical desire. Ferdinand's gesture -- running his right hand down his left arm, finally grasping the wrist -- mixed sensuality, urgency, and awareness." (p.34)
When I read this, what immediately comes to my mind is how Harryhausen characterized Mighty Joe Young. He decided that whenever Joe gets frustrated, he bangs his fist on the ground several times. It's a simple concept -- ("ideograph" is a fancy word) -- but it's a powerful one, and one that comes from the world of directing more than acting.
I find myself asking: What else is there in the world of directing, besides ideographs, which I don't know about yet? ...Which could maybe contribute to creating great performances?
I absolutely want to study books about acting (which I've heard recommended to animators several times)... But hypothetically, how far could I go towards creating great performances if I read nothing but books about directing?
(Anyone want to recommend any good books about directing?)
;-)
posted by sven | permalink | comments (0) | categories: stopmo
February 8, 2008
my stopmo camera set-up
by sven at 7:00 am
"A Word From Professor Ichbonnsen" was a big leap forward for me in several ways. I did lipsync for the first time... I explored a pose-to-pose approach to stopmo... And I shot using a digital still camera.
I recently wrote a post titled "how to connect your digital still camera to a computer - explained"... So I'm not going to go into every detail about my set-up today. However, what that post was really missing was a good diagram. ...So here ya go, I've created one.
Note: In this configuration, the DV cam is being used as an analog-to-digital converter.
On my first stopmo film, The Great Escape, I used the DV cam for image capture. The picture quality was nowhere near as good as what I can get with the still cam -- but one nice thing was that I only needed one cord (the FireWire) going between it and the computer.
Oh, and I guess another nice thing was that I only needed one piece of software running: FrameThief. Using a DSC, I need 3 softwares running simultaneously: FrameThief, RemoteCapture, and Proxi.
Proxi -- since you probably haven't heard of it -- manages applescripts, so I can trigger FrameThief and RemoteCapture with a single keystroke. I am much indebted to Evan DeRushie for sharing the relevant script with me, and pointing me in Proxi's direction.
There is a perennial problem with using a DSC to shoot stopmo: flicker. Stopmoes complain about flicker furiously... But you don't often see an actual example. I thought it would be illustrative to show an abandoned shot here.
Watch the clip. See how some frames are randomly lighter than others? That's flicker. I made the still shot above out of a flicker frame and a non-flicker frame to highlight the contrast.
There are several possible causes of flicker:
- A camera's internal programming automatically adjusts the images it takes, before you ever see them. This can lead to inconsistencies. The way around this problem is to shoot in RAW format. When you look at a RAW file, you're seeing what the capture chip actually saw. The files are huge, but you also (I'm told) have a lot more ability to adjust the images.
- With most DSCs, the camera's aperture re-adjusts itself with each shot taken. For consumer-grade cameras, there's just nothing to do about this. For the high-end DSLR cams, though, you can get lenses that don't auto-adjust. It's a very pricey solution.
- Fluctuations in electrical current can effect both the camera and your lighting set-up. In a residential home, a refrigerator turning on or off can have a significant impact on your images. The solution: to get a voltometer which can smooth out the spikes and dips in your current.
Thanks to some early-morning advice from my photo-wiz friend Michael Hall, I was able to figure out how to use RAW files. And happily, that solved most of my flicker problems.
(By the way: most image editing software can't deal with RAW files. Luckily, by digging around in my applications folder I was was able to find a program -- which came with the camera originally -- that can translate RAW files into jpgs.)
So, most of my flicker woes were solved... But not all of them. If you watch the final film carefully, there's a hint of flicker in that first shot of Ichbonnsen.
It's a curious flicker, though... It seems to move from the top of the screen to the bottom... It doesn't seem even. Could it be the result of a reflection, or some other practical lighting condition?
Right now, I think looking into voltometers is my next least-radical step.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: stopmo
February 5, 2008
the making of "a word from professor ichbonnsen"
by sven at 9:15 pm
I've been flummoxed for a month about how to structure a post describing the making of "A Word From Professor Ichbonnsen." I think now what I'll do is use this post to illustrate the "pose-to-pose" (or "keyframing") method of doing stopmo, which I've been writing about...incessantly...for the past day or so.
"The sound leads." Here's an amusingly embarrassing clip of me recording the voicetrack. (Thanks to Gretchin for thinking to tape this!)
I did the recording in a walk-in closet, thinking that the clothes would help prevent echoes. I used the built-in microphone in my laptop and GarageBand for capture. I did some clean-up of the sound afterwards using Sound Soap.
After finishing the voicetrack, I imported the sound file into the free lipsync analysis program, Papagayo. Doing the analysis is actually very intuitive and simple to do -- but the mouth shapes that come with the program (to demo your lipsync) are pretty useless.
I decided that after doing my analysis and transferring it to X-sheets, I should proof the lipsync to make sure it looked right. A fairly easy task -- and not having to worry about whether the mouths are right during actual filming... Well, that more than makes up for the time spent on proofing.
The mouth shapes that I used on this project are straight out of Preston Blair's book "Cartoon Animation." I've looked through quite a few books, and so far nothing comes close to the clarity of Blair's mouth shape illustrations. Good way to learn on my first serious lipsync'd film, I figure.
The mouths are photocopied onto sticker paper, hand-colored, and cut out. I've got a reference key attached to a clipboard. I tried covering the reference sheet with acetate -- but to my surprise, the stickers adhere to it strongly. I tried using wax paper instead and found that it both easily releases the stickers, and I can see the reference chart through it with no problem.
Phonemes are the audible sounds that make up words. Visemes are the visual mouth shapes of a language. You can figure out lipsync analysis by looking in a mirror... But I decided that while it may not be 100% accurate, I'm quite content to at least rough out an analysis by having a cheat-chart of which visemes go with which phonemes.
While Blair's book was an invaluable starting point, I did need to make judgement calls about which visemes I was going to include, and exactly how I wanted to map them to phonemes.
I found it very useful to re-name the phonemes... Linguistic marks are troublesome to create on a computer -- transliterations work better here.
I locked down my camera and photographed the puppet's head wearing each of my 15 mouth shapes. I imported these 15 photos into AfterEffects. Reading through my X-sheet notes, I dragged instances of the photos into a new timeline, creating a lipsync proof film, one frame at a time.
While still in AfterEffects, I added on a time code -- so if I found a frame that looked wrong, it would be a simple matter to locate and correct it. I was really astonished when I was doing lipsync tests a month or two back to discover just how much a single bad frame can stand out. I got lucky this time, and felt satisfied with my lipsync on the first try.
To finish up pre-production work on the lipsync, I went through my X-sheets and made sure that every frame was marked for which mouth would be required. As an example, "Sven" might get written out as: 1-X ... 2-FV ... 3-Eh ... 4-Eh ... 5-X.
With the voicetrack all pre-planned, I moved on to developing poses. To do this, I started by just brainstorming all sorts of poses that might fit with the energy of the scene. This is a short clip, and Ichbonnsen doesn't walk anywhere, so nine photographs of pose options seemed plenty.
Selecting five photographs from the visual brainstorm, I assembled them into an order that seemed to make sense. Using the script and the X-sheets to choose logical moments for pose changes, I created a new "pop-thru" clip in AfterEffects. This clip would be my visual reference while filming.
I made notes on my X-sheets about how long each pose should last. One last thing to do: figure out how long each transition between poses should take.
I've tried using a stopwatch while acting out the poses to try to figure out timing. I don't like it. It's hard to stop and start the stopwatch with precision... And time is measured in 1/100th of a second -- rather than 1/24th, which is what I need for animating.
So, I switched over to using an electric metronome. Mind you, I don't care about "beat mapping" the entire film -- all I want is to figure out how long each transition should last. Setting the metronome to 60 beats per minute (bpm) gives me a "click" each second -- that is, every 24 frames. 120bpm is a click every 12 frames... 180bpm is a click every 8 frames... And so on.
Listening to an audible beat while acting out the transitions made it very easy to get a sense of how long a particular transition should last. I'm excited: it feels like if I continue using this method, I'll very quickly be able to get a sense for how to estimate how long any particular action will take on screen. (Well, so long as it's a very short action!)
On to filming. ...D'oh! Ten frames in, I kicked the tripod and ruined my shot!
Well... I had a little insight about the tripod while working on this film. When I kick the legs of my tripod, it's usually not at the very bottom -- it's halfway up. So, this time around, I used a piece of foamcore sandwiched between bricks to create a wall -- which keeps me from coming anywhere near the damned thing.
And the wall worked like a charm!
Here's your reward for wading through this long post: The finished film!
But wait... One last extra treat: A peek at the film that didn't get made.
Everything I've described in this post happened in one long marathon, during the Saturday, Sunday, and Monday leading up to midnight of New Year's Eve. As late as Friday, I was planning on going with a different script, one which had the Professor getting swallowed by the "giant lightning sloth" pictured on Monster Month's cover.
Ultimately I could see that I just wasn't going to have time to get an adequate monster puppet built. As you can see above, though, I bought faux fur and was roughing out the thing over a cardboard frame.
Heh... And besides not having time for fabrication, I realized too late that set wasn't big enough to get something as big as the lightning sloth in frame. Y'know, I originally wanted to shoot with a 16:9 aspect ratio... If that's going to be the case, gotta have a wider set next time!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (6) | categories: stopmo
February 4, 2008
principles of pose-to-pose stopmo
by sven at 6:07 pm
I thought of a different way to summarize the animation approach I'm exploring. Here are six key aspects:
1) The Sound Leads
When you don't have a voice track, you have a lot more freedom. As soon as you have talking, you're committed to a more structured approach. Lipsync more or less demands using an X-sheet. Yet, there's still room for improvisation with the body.
Personally, I'm finding that I prefer animating when there's a voicetrack. When I know what the character is thinking, I have more fixed points in time to which I can attach interesting gestures. I'm tempted, the next time I animate a non-speaking sequence, to record a dummy voicetrack of the character's thoughts -- just to help guide my performance.
(I know that Nick's animations more often than not don't have a voicetrack -- so this is probably one of the most fundamental points at which our methods begin to diverge.)
2) Use Your X-Sheets
Lots of animation gets done without X-sheets. For me, X-sheets are vital for lipsync... I want to have done my voicetrack analysis and checked it for accuracy before I start the real animation, so I can just focus on the rest of the performance. Further, I figure the more information I'm able to capture on the x-sheets in advance, the more additional details I'll ultimately be able to layer in.
3) Hold-Transition-Hold
The rhythm of the animation that I'm doing is "hold-transition-hold." I make sure a pose "reads" by holding it still -- until it's time to transition to the next pose. Hypothetically, a pose could be held for as little as two or three frames... It needn't necessarily feel like the motion is "stop-and-start." Hold-transition-hold doesn't preclude overlapping action, either; secondary motions can be hold-transition-hold on their own time-line.
4) Non-Linear Pose Development
By using a digital camera locked down in the same position that I'm going to use for the final shot, I can take a whole bunch of shots of different pose options, brainstorming... Instead of treating a pop-through as a sort of dress rehearsal for the final performance, I assemble a pop-through from photographs taken in no particular order. A virtue of this method is that it allows you to select your best options from a large pool. A limitation is that you can only really swap between photos taken when the puppet was standing on the same spot (i.e. walks may be more problematic).
5) Animating To A Beat
How do you decide how much time a transition should take? Rather than acting out each action and timing it with a stopwatch, I'm trying to use a metronome to learn what 4 frames, 8 frames, 12 frames (etc.) feel like in my body. Rather than assign a unique time-period to each transition, I'm trying to learn how to estimate how many frames different actions will take, based upon their musicality -- which is interpreted in terms of "beats per minute."
(Note: I recognize that this is an atypical use of the phrase "animating to a beat," which usually refers to animating a character moving in time with music.)
6) Pop-Thru Rotoscoping
Stopmo animation is inherently a "straight-forward" process; you can't work non-linearly, tweaking different frames into perfection. The closest we can come to a "pose-to-pose" process, I believe, is establishing keyframes -- and then figuring out how to get from one to the next.
In order to simulate keyframes, I am using photographs of the puppet that I am animating, taken from the same camera angle as the final shot. These "keys" are assembled into a pop-through film which can then either be used as a reference clip, or for actual rotoscoping.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (0) | categories: stopmo
pose-to-pose stopmo
by sven at 1:42 am
[Note: I've also posted this entry at StopMotionAnimation.com, where it is being discussed here: http://www.stopmotionanimation.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=showtopic&forum=9&topicid=4968&mesg_id=4968&page=]
Stopmo as we've always known it is "straight ahead." Click a frame... Move the puppet... Repeat.
Cel animation can be "straight ahead," but most of the time it's "pose-to-pose." You draw the extreme poses in a sequence, and then fill in the "inbetweens."
While working on the "A word from Professor Ichbonnsen" short, I decided that I really wanted to find a way to make stopmo as pose-to-pose as possible.
See, there's a lot that you can do to plan your stopmo... But it seems to me that there's a prevailing notion in the stopmo community that you should just start shooting and improvise your way forward.
As I'm working my way through Barry Purves' new book, I've been struck by the feeling that although he plans his animation in detail, there's still a strong physical memory of improvising your way forward...
And this makes me feel that the full extent of the framegrabber revolution has not been fully appreciated yet... That there is a technological generation gap between Barry and I -- and that because of the ways that I am learning to make stopmo now, I will never feel the animating process in my body the way that he does.
Here is the process that I came up with for making stopmo essentially "pose-to-pose."
First I recorded my soundtrack, broke down all the phonemes using the freeware "Papagayo", and then transferred the timing for mouth shapes to an X-sheet (AKA "exposure sheet" or "dope sheet").
I didn't want to have to think about whether or not the lipsync was right while I was animating, so I decided to test it to make sure it was solid. I took 15 photos of stationary heads wearing my collection of mouth stickers. I brought those photos into AfterEffects, and then threw instances of them into the sequence indicated by my X-sheet. I exported the sequence as a QuickTime, and confirmed that the lipsync would be good.
Next, I needed to develop the body's poses. To do this, I locked my camera in place, and simply took a bunch of shots of different poses -- brainstorming them, in no particular order.
I took these possibilities into AfterEffects, and found an order where my favorite poses flowed together in a way that seemed to make sense with the audio track. I marked on my X-sheet how long each pose was supposed to be held.
That dealt with poses... Finally I had to figure out my transitions. Rather than use the stopwatch, as is traditional, I used a metronome. 60bpm (beats per minute) = 1 beat per 24 frames. 120bpm = 1 beat per 12 frames. 180bpm = 1 beat per 8 frames. (I got this idea from LIO's site, but also saw the idea of using musical beats per minute in the book "Timing for Animation.")
For me, it was profoundly useful to be able to act out my transition to an ongoing beat, rather than trying to start and stop a watch. I decided "OK, this transition is fast -- it gets six frames... This transition is slow -- it gets 12 frames..." And so on.
When I went to animate, I kept my QuickTime of the poses open in a side window for reference... But animating was basically just a matter of transferring my X-sheet notes into the puppet's body: Pose... Transition... Pose... Transition...
I really, really liked doing almost all of the planning work before I got to the animator's table. And yet, I'm having some cognitive dissonance.
Barry talks elegantly about a puppet being like a tiny costume that the animator projects themselves into... A concept I mentioned myself, previously, in the essay on stopmo aesthetics....
But when you do the planning in advance, it doesn't quite feel like that. At least, not how I think the experience is supposed to feel.
I'm focussed, and I'm putting out animation that I like... But am I truly animating? In the sense of putting a bit of my own life into the puppet?
Granted, this was a very simple clip I did -- the Prof's feet never move... Maybe I'll discover when I have to do a shot with walks and such, that there are motions that simply cannot be planned... But honestly, I suspect that with being able to take test shots with a DSC, there are few "extremes" that you can't plan out in advance.
How big of a revolution is this? How much has the experience of stopmo animating changed -- perhaps forever?
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: stopmo
February 3, 2008
how to connect your digital still camera to a computer - explained
by sven at 11:59 pm
I just wrote a long email to a friend explaining how a Digital Still Camera might be connected to a computer. It seemed to me that this information might be useful to others, so I decided to repost it here.
If you haven't visited the Scarlet Letters blog before, please note that this is specifically intended for people who do stop-motion animation.
==============================
So, let's say you have a digital still camera and a computer. How do pictures get from your camera to the computer?
PATH #1: USB CORD
I'm going to answer the question "How do pictures get from your camera to your computer?" with another question: "How do you usually download your photos?" Usually when you take photos and then download them, they go through a USB cord.
But, how does the computer know to download them? Software. If you're using a Mac, you open up iPhoto and it recognizes that a camera is attached to the computer, and it downloads them for you. OR, you might have software that came with the camera that allows you to download the photos you took.
Now, certain software allows you to do something more than just download photos... It actually allows you to activate the camera's shutter by pushing a key on the computer. For Canon brand cameras (at least when I bought mine), this software is called RemoteCapture. The ability to snap off photos without touching the camera is something that we as stopmoes very much want -- because if we touch the camera to take a shot, we're going to very slightly move it -- and that messes up our shots.
A program like RemoteCapture can be used as a basic framegrabber. Whatever you can see in the LCD screen on the back of your camera, RemoteCapture can show you on your computer screen. This is a sort of "live out." You don't have niceties like onion skinning and toggling... But it can work OK.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could just use a USB cord to hook up your camera to the computer, and then turn on a framegrabber like FrameThief or Dragon? Well, too bad! It doesn't work, and here's why... Every brand of camera uses a different language to talk with the computer. Each kind of camera will only interface with the computer using a proprietary software. If you attach your camera to the computer with a USB cord, FrameThief won't know that there's a camera attached at all -- it has no way of talking to the alien device.
However, this may not be the case if you're using Dragon with a Canon or Nikon camera. Part of what's so exciting about Dragon is that the Caliris (as I understand it) have bothered to look into what language these cameras use, so Dragon can itself function as a RemoteCapture program.
PATH #2: AV OUT
(Just to remind you, the question is: "How do pictures get from your camera to the computer?")
Many digital still cameras have the ability to capture short videos. If you look at the side of your camera, there's probably a 1/8" wide hole somewhere marked AV. (It may be color-coded yellow.) What comes out of this hole?
Video can come out of this hole. And that's what a framegrabber wants to see. A framegrabber to be able to show you what the camera is looking at, and change the image in real time as you move the camera around.
But here's the problem. The signal that is coming out of that hole is analog, not digital. It's intended to be connected to a VCR -- not a computer. However, fortunately, there are ways to convert that analog signal to digital.
Let's take another look at that hole. Like I said, it's 1/8" in diameter. The cord that you're supposed to attach there is called an AV cord, and the other end of it should split into 3 connectors: red, white, and yellow. The red-white-yellow end is called "RCA." If you have a stereo, the red and white connectors may look very familiar -- they're the ones that carry the right and left signals for stereo sound. The yellow one carries video -- which is why the 1/8" hole may be marked with yellow.
OK, so let's say that you have yourself an AV cord (1/8" connector on one end, RCA on the other end). What can we connect the red-white-yellow end to? Like I said, you could connect it to a VCR -- but that does us no good. You could also connect it to an analog-digital converter, and from there send a digital signal into the computer.
You could buy a stand-alone analog-digital converter. The last time I checked (which was a while ago), they cost about $250. OR, you might be able to use a digital video camera. That's what I do. I have a Canon ZR45 DV cam, which does the job. Unfortunately, a DV cam that's being used as an analog-digital converter may not work for all digital still cams -- so you have to check.
Here's how I get my DV cam to work with the digital still cam and the computer... The DV cam can't accept the RCA cable directly; but it does accept an S-video cable in. So I went to Radio Shack and bought an RCA-to-S-video adaptor for about $30. It's about the size of an A battery. So, I've got an ugly chain of cables -- but it works to get the analog signal from my DSC into my DV cam: Digtital Still Camera -> AV cord -> RCA to S-video adaptor -> S-video cord -> DV cam.
From the DV cam to the computer is much easier -- I just need a FireWire cable. Make sure the settings on the DV cam are correct, and your framegrabber can now see what whatever would normally be showing on your DSC's LCD display. (It's worth noting that if I want to capture images using my DV cam, the FireWire is all I'll ever need.)
Are we ready to shoot films with the DSC? Not quite. There's one more important thing to deal with. See, the image that is being sent from the DSC to the computer is whatever you would normally see on the camera's LCD screen. That means the resolution is probably 640x480 pixels -- which is far less than what you were probably hoping for.
Understand that what you're seeing in the framegrabber is not what you're going to use for your final film -- it's just a preview that helps you take the "beauty shots." How do you capture the beauty shots? There are two solutions.
Solution #1: You can use a remote control to trigger the DSC's shutter, and capture all the images on the camera's memory card. Later on, you download the photos and assemble them into a film. There are two problems with this solution... You can only take as many photos as your camera's memory can hold... And, more significantly, it's a pain in the ass to delete a photo if you decide you made a mistake. Part of the whole point of having a framegrabber is being able to realize when you made a mistake, and backtrack by deleting some photos.... But if the beauty shots are all on the camera's memory card, you can't delete mistakes immediately -- you need to make a note for later, to delete the problem images after they've been downloaded.
Solution #2: You can run two programs at once: The framegrabber, and your camera's proprietary Remote Capture software. The framegrabber will save its files in one folder, and the Remote Capture software will save its (considerably larger) files in another. Each time you want to take a photo, you need to hit two buttons -- one in the framegrabber, one in the Remote Capture program. There are ways to make this somewhat simpler... You can create a script that will allow you to trigger both softwares simultaneously... But, as you can see, this actually requires a third piece of software to be running at the same time.
And, yes, this is what I actually bothered with when I shot my "A Word From Professor Ichbonnsen" short.
PATH #3: SPYCAM
(Again, the question is: "How do pictures get from your camera to the computer?")
There is a more low-tech strategy for getting pictures into the framegrabber, a strategy which has worked for folks like Nick Hilligoss for years. That is: Attach a tiny spycam to the optical viewfinder of the camera.
As I mentioned in the previous section, the wiring for connecting a DV cam (or a digital spycam, or a webcam) to the computer is easy: all you need is a FireWire cable.
The image that your framegrabber uses will likely be a bit dark... And due to parallax, it won't be exactly what the DSC sees when it takes a shot -- but it's pretty close, and good enough to let you know that everything is in frame.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: stopmo
January 19, 2008
fish puppet for shelley
by sven at 8:00 am
At Thursday's "virtual open studio," I built a fish puppet for stopmo co-conspirator Shelley Noble.
At the outset, I had more "Halfland"-ish ideas: where the scales would have letters on them, or be made from materials from our collage bins... But the scale of the puppet (uh, size) -- and how lovely it was turning out -- made me ditch those concepts. No big deal. It looks like a puppet version of the fishes I've been painting for years. It's neat just getting to see a 3D version of these.
And regardless of how the project ultimately turned out, it's actually done. Can't knock that, either.
A bit about the construction. The body was made from a bit of scrap wood. I cut off the corners, filed it into shape, and sanded it down.
The side fins and tail are detachable. I drilled holes into the body and hot-glued telescoping K&S in. The larger piece is 7/32", the smaller is 3/16". The purpose of this: the plug-ins serve as rigging points if you want to have the fish suspended in mid-air.
The struts of the fins are made from 1/16" aluminum armature wire. The fin webbing is athletic underwrap -- two layers, which sandwich the wires. The wires are attached to the underwrap with Fabri-Tac glue. So... All the fins and the tail are fully posable for animation.
The whole thing is painted with acrylics. The scales were made with a hole-punch and cardstock that I painted on both sides. I wrapped a little extra underwrap around the places where the K&S plug-ins are, just to disguise them a bit better.
Incidentally, I'm really happy with how the photo turned out. The backdrop is made from two sheets of scrapbooker paper. It's sitting on top of a light table, and I'm pointing a desk lamp at it, which has been covered with a sheet of typing paper. Essentially I'm flooding the scene with diffuse light from all directions.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (5) | categories: stopmo
January 12, 2008
the advantages and drawbacks of cg
by sven at 12:01 am
During the past decade, we've seen an enormous amount of computer animation in feature films.
Among the stopmoes at StopMotionAnimation.com, I hear a lot of frustration about this. We've lost ground. Seeing stopmo in feature films is rare now. Many of the artisans who used to have the skills for doing feature-worthy effects haven't been able to find enough work, and have had to move on. Hard-won craft knowledge is dying off. There are regular rants about the "suits" in Hollywood not understanding what can be accomplished with stopmo, and not putting money behind it.
My strongest love and loyalty is to stopmo. Yet, part of my mind wants to get beyond the rants and understand in depth what's behind the rise of CG. Call it playing the "devil's advocate" -- or just really wanting to know "why?"
INTRO: CG HAS DISPLACED MONSTERS AND CARTOONS
Where in feature films do we see computer animation?
It seems to me that there are two areas where CG has come to dominate: monster films, and "cartoon" animation.
For three generations, if you wanted to have full-body monsters on screen, you needed to use stopmo. Willis O'Brien was the progenitor of this heritage, animating the 1933 King Kong. He was followed by his protege Ray Harryhausen, who single-handedly produced the effects for such classics as "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms," "Jason And The Argonauts," and "Clash of the Titans." Ray's mantle as master of the art form was passed on to Phil Tippett, working within the company Industrial Light and Magic. His style came to be known as "Hyper-Harryhausen" -- more photo-realistic monsters, but with the addition of motorized "go-motion" to create blurs (e.g. for the taun-taun in "The Empire Strikes Back," and the dragon in "Dragon Slayer").
"Jurassic Park," (1993) effectively ended the tradition. A few more films used stopmo for monster effects after it came out... But Jurassic Park's success began the swift transition over to CG.
The other area where we see CG films dominating now is in what I'll call -- for lack of a better word -- "cartoon films." Films like "Ice Age," "Finding Nemo," "Over the Hedge," and "Monster House" previously would have been done using hand-drawn cel animation. The landmark film that began the shift to CG was "Toy Story"... The death-knell signaling that cel animation had seriously lost ground: when Disney dissolved its cel animation division.
I hasten to point out that "cartoon" feature films are a genre that stopmo has NEVER dominated in the USA. Stopmo feature films have always been rarities. If I'm not mistaken, the first feature-length clay-animation stopmo film was Will Vinton's "The Adventures of Mark Twain" in 1984. The first feature-length puppetfilm in the USA followed in 1993: "The Nightmare Before Christmas."
Since then, we've seen further feature-length puppetfilms and claymation -- but coming from an astonishingly limited number of artists/producers. "James and the Giant Peach" and "Coraline" come from Henry Selick, and "Corpse Bride" comes from Tim Burton -- the same two individuals who produced "The Nightmare Before Christmas." Will Vinton studios has dissolved and reemerged as Laika, which is employing Selick to produce "Coraline." Meanwhile, it seems to me that the spiritual successor to the Vinton Claymation tradition has manifested in the UK in the form of Aardman studios -- whom we have to thank for "Wallace and Gromit."
Thus, when we look at "cartoonish" CG films and wish that Hollywood producers were making them in stopmo instead, we would do well to recall that this is not a genre that we have lost ground -- rather, we are only beginning to make our first inroads.
THE MERITS OF USING CG FOR MONSTERS
What are the advantages of using computer animation to create monsters and other similar effects? Here's the list I come up with:
1) Editable.
Whereas a stopmo creature delivers a performance which you cannot go back and tweak, computer animation can be tweaked and edited endlessly. Given the financial risk associated with producing a feature film, this is a huge plus.
2) Crowd shots.
Ray Harryhausen pushed the limits of what can be done with stopmo by having Jason fight seven skeletons simultaneously. Stopmo is best suited to dealing with just a few puppets at one time. With CG, on the other hand, you can produce whole armies of creatures.
3) Less dependence on master animators.
When you have to get a shot right on the first try, you hire a master animator to accomplish it. When you have the freedom to edit, you have a much broader pool of talent to hire from.
4) You only need to build one model of a character.
When "The Nightmare Before Christmas" was being filmed, there had to be a dozen or so copies of Jack Skellington, so different animators could be working at the same time on different sets. When your "puppet" is a data file, you can give duplicate copies to many animators, with no further expenditure of time or money.
5) Simplification of materials.
When you do computer animation, everything is made out of pixels. When you're building stopmo puppets, there are many materials to procure: foam latex, silicone rubber, paints, steel and silver solder... And each of these different materials requires specialized tools: brushes, ovens, spray booths, lathes... This is not to say that CG doesn't require specialized softwares and specialized skillsets (modeling, rigging, animating) -- but things are simplified nonetheless.
6) Less physical storage space needed for props.
After you've made a film, what do you do with all the puppets and sets you constructed? Some might be auctioned off -- but a lot will go into cold storage, which consumes space (which also costs money). Keeping data over the long term is highly problematic -- but in the short-term, it's a huge space-saver.
7) Models don't degrade over time.
Puppets get dirty or break and need to be cleaned or replaced. After a few years, foam latex starts to rot. CG models remain immaculate during the course of filming. (In the long run, "bit rot" is a problem, though.)
8) Lighting.
One of the more tricky parts of compositing a stopmo monster puppet with live action footage is getting the lighting to match -- it's a delicate art. With CG, you can use virtual lights on your subject... Another instance where being able to edit CG sequences inside the computer makes the filmmaker's life easier.
9) Shadows can be accomplished without miniature sets.
In stopmo, if you want a puppet's shadow to fall on something, you can't do that with a green screen -- you have to build a miniature set. With CG, you can create transparent shadows that get composited in over live action footage. You may need to model planes that the shadows fall on, but this is usually a fairly simple matter.
10) Dark shots.
When you shoot against a blue screen or green screen, you need a fairly high level of illumination in order to make sure that the backdrop is a uniform color. You probably can't shoot a monster that's supposed to be in a darkened room and just green screen it into your shot -- you'll probably have to build a miniature version of the set. With CG, shadowed creatures are easy to composit.
11) Key-framing.
Both cel animation and computer animation allow you to pose key-frames and then make "inbetweens" to connect them. This isn't an option in stopmo -- which is one of its special challenges. You can plan an animated sequence in stopmo by shooting a "pop-through" -- but you don't ever get to use those actual photos in the final.
12) Complicated sequences can be animated piecemeal.
In CG, you can animate in passes... First just animating the monster's spine, then going back and doing its limbs, then finessing its claws, and finally working on the facial expressions. In stopmo, you have to pay attention to all of these things all at once.
13) Reusable sequences.
After you've animated a monster in CG, you can re-use that performance many times, looking at it from different camera angles. (For instance, if you have an army of monsters fighting.) With stopmo, because you only get one camera angle, you are almost never able to reuse a performance.
14) Algorithm-based motion.
With CG creatures, certain motions can be accomplished through programming rather than key-framing. A millipede's legs or a robot's walk, for instance, are good candidates for this technique. Obviously, it's not an option for stopmo.
15) Easily combined with other effects.
Because CG already exists in the computer environment, it's relatively easy to combine it with other special effects -- e.g. fire, smoke, water, explosions. Fire and water are notoriously difficult to accomplish with stopmo... It's often easier to use other means to create such illusions -- but then you're left with the difficulty of how to fuse them with the original stopmo performance. (Imagine getting a dragon to realistically breathe fire, for instance.)
THE DRAWBACKS OF USING CG FOR MONSTERS
What about the inherent drawbacks of using CG? My list is much shorter:
1) Less textural.
Most of the textures we see on CG monsters are simulated. The scales on a dragon generally aren't modeled in virtual 3D space -- they're painted onto flat polygons. See, the more polygons you have, the longer it takes to render out frames. To an extent these painted-on scales can be programmed to catch light and shadow -- but this strategy produces less convincing results than when you do actual 3D modeling. Stopmo, on the other hand, uses real textures -- which have an inherently "real" look to to them.
2) Unrealistic lighting.
CG lighting often has a flatness to it. In real life, shadows are often stark and whites are blown out -- but you hardly ever see this in computer animation. To an extent, it's the result of aesthetic choices. In a "good" image, you don't choose to have blown out whites -- but that's not necessarily the most realistic choice. Rendering lighting conditions such as "radiosity" (ambient, reflected light) and sub-dermal glow (flesh's subtle translucency) require a lot of computation... In terms of the time it takes to create these effects, they're very expensive. Stopmo, on the other hand, by using real light, bypasses many of these problems.
3) "Floaty" animation.
From its earliest days, computer animation has fought against its tendency to look "floaty" -- as if things are moving around without being impacted by gravity or friction. Much has been done to improve this tendency -- and yet, its roots are inherent in allowing the computer to create inbetweens for you. Stopmo is often accused of being "herky-jerky"... But in reality, living animals move with some jerkiness. To an extent, what has been perceived as a flaw of stopmo adds to its feeling of "life."
4) Not hands-on.
There's a computer screen between you and the thing that you're trying to animate. To me at least, it's easier to relate to how a thing is supposed to move when I can actually touch it.
WEIGHING THE ADVANTAGES VERSUS DRAWBACKS
When I spell out all the advantages of using CG for monsters, it seems like a really staggering list to me. I don't find it surprising at all that CG would become the first tool of choice for a filmmaker when confronted with a special effects challenge... And I can understand why, over time, there would be an impulse to just do all of your effects work with CG and forget about the other options.
On the labor-supply end of things, I can also see why CG has become so successful. There's a uniformity of software -- which makes it easier to train potential employees. Learning the art of stopmo has largely remained a master-apprentice process (or perhaps even more often, a matter of being self-taught)... Learning how to use a piece of software like Maya, on the other hand, is easily accomplished in a classroom context. Hollywood needs an army of interchangeable CG modelers, riggers, and animators -- so the institutional schooling system responds by offering relevant majors to students.
Stopmoes should remember that computer animation is not just displacing our own work -- artists who make hand-drawn cel animation are also in jeopardy.
It seems that computer-created cartoons are evolving in two main directions: ones created using 3D modeling software such as Lightwave and Maya -- and ones created using 2D vector-based software, such as Flash. The 3D cartoon look is exemplified by films such as "Cars," "Ratatouille," "Happy Feet," "Veggie Tales," and "Barnyard." The Flash cartoon look is exemplified by TV shows like "Powerpuff Girls" and "Samarai Jack." For this essay, I'll limit discussion to 3D productions.
THE MERITS OF USING CG FOR CARTOONS
So: What are the advantages of making something like "Mickey Mouse" or "The Secret of NIMH" using computers rather than pencils and paint?
1) Characters are guaranteed to stay "on model."
When you're hand-drawing characters, it takes a lot of skill to keep mass and shape looking correct. With CG, this is a non-issue.
2) Elimination of the inbetweener's job.
Instead of having to pay people to draw the inbetween pictures, all you need is someone who'll do the key poses (in theory).
3) Ease of editing.
When you want to make a minor edit to a sequence, instead of having to re-draw it you can simply push your digital puppet a bit more this way or that -- and the computer will take care of the rest of the fixes for you.
4) Easier to rotate geometrical shapes.
In hand-drawn animation, it's much easier to rotate objects that are round and squishy... Hard-edged rectangular objects are difficult to rotate accurately. Not so for a computer.
5) Lighting effects are easier.
Want a shadow? Want to change the color palette of a scene from high noon to midnight? No problem.
6) Savings on film stock, cels, paint.
Computers aren't cheap -- but (theoretically) they represent a one-time expense. In place of materials costs you have... Electricity bills.
THE DRAWBACKS OF USING CG FOR CARTOONS
What about the disadvantages of using CG for cartoon films?
1) Fewer cheats.
You can't just imply a location impressionistically with a few lines and swaths of color -- everything you want on screen has to be modeled.
2) Less life in the inbetweens.
A lot of the exciting character of animation happens in the inbetween poses. If you leave that work to the computer, the product is going to be more boring at a very fundamental level.
3) Less squash and stretch.
Yes, to an extent you can squash and stretch computer models... But if you go too far, the rigging (digital armature) will break. You can rig special models for special effects -- but it takes a conscious effort to create the extremes that a pencil can draw with complete ease.
4) Fewer lively "off model" poses.
There's a school of thought (championed most loudly by John Kricfalusi) that focuses on creating truly unique poses and expressions for animated characters. These are, almost by definition, "off model." It's an approach that is contrary to what computer animation does best: uniformity.
5) Absence of line quality.
A huge amount of expressiveness is conveyed through the hand-drawn lines that an animator makes. These don't exist for CG characters.
AGAIN, WEIGHING THE ADVANTAGES VERSUS DRAWBACKS
When the problem is how to create a monster that interacts with live-action actors, CG and stopmo offer two different solutions -- but there is a common criteria for judgement: do the results look photo-realistic? All other considerations aside, CG will usually win out because it is able to provide images that are on the whole more complicated and better integrated into live-action sequences.
When we compare CG and hand-drawn cartoons, however, the products don't look remotely the same. The shared goal? To tell a story that can't be told with live-action. [I'm tempted to say "a story with talking animals," since that is a frequent commonality -- but it wouldn't include a film like "The Incredibles."]
CG cartoons and hand-drawn cartoons ought to be able to co-exist as two separate and unique forms of animation... And yet, how can we ignore Disney dissolving its cel animation branch?
It seems to me that while CG has not delivered the deathblow to hand-drawn cartoons that it's dealt to stopmo monsters, displacement and domination are apparent. Personally, I would say it's largely due to the entertainment industry's aspirations to be... Well, industrial.
The same art school students who are being trained to do modeling, rigging, and animating using Lightwave and Maya for special effects -- they're easily repurposed for CG cartoon films. Companies like Disney were essentially factories to begin with -- but with the standardization that computers (and computer training) provides, the working parts of the entertainment machine (i.e. animators) become even more interchangable.
For an entertainment corporation, the only purpose that "artistry" has is to win Oscars, which act as a form of advertising for the product. So long as the product is "good enough," selling enough units to turn a profit, artistry is expendable...
At least so long as brand recognition doesn't suffer. If different companies' products don't look different from each other -- then there's a reason to start bringing artistry back into the mix!
OUTRO: NEW NICHES FOR STOPMO TO SCRATCH
The phenomenal success of CG as an animation technique is also its Achilles' Heel. Because all of the big entertainment companies have rushed to embrace it, the old techniques have essentially become new again.
There is room for stopmo to be revived for monster films -- and not just as retro pastiche. However, it can never again be the default. From now on, it has to be used as a conscious choice. A name-recognition director very much has it in their power to go this route.
An example: Wes Anderson. Anderson is known for his unique vision; people go to see his films in part if not largely because he's the author. In "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," he bucked the trend and used stopmo instead of CG for all his underwater creatures. The most important of them all -- the Jaguar Shark -- is essentially a monster. This isn't your typical (read "cliched") monster film -- but it's an example of stopmo being used for realistic monster effects, nonetheless.
With regards to cartoon films, again, because the big studios have all rushed to embrace CG (for fear of being left behind?) there's now a void ripe for a daring entertainment company to exploit.
Enter Laika. See, Pixar's doing CG, Disney's doing CG... If Laika starts pumping out stopmo features like "Coraline," it doesn't have any competition! If it does well with this film, it has a chance to quickly establish market dominance.
So how will the other big players in the USA respond? Well, rumor has it that Disney's agreed to do a stopmo remake of Tim Burton's "Frankenweenie." [There's Tim Burton again, one of three-or-so individuals who's currently getting free reign to make stopmo films when he wants.] It seems to me that Disney has seen their blunder... And rather than letting Laika get the upper hand, it's going to counter with its own stopmo product.
Laika and Disney both putting out stopmo products? Remember, there's only been a handful of feature-length stopmo films made in the USA -- EVER. This is an unprecedented scenario... Which, optimistically, could lead to a new boom for stopmo.
A SURPRISE ENDING: "IT'S THE DIRECTORS, DUMMY"
I think the year that "Wallace and Gromit" and "Corpse Bride" were both up for Oscars represents a turning point. "Coraline" will build upon that momentum... And if we're very lucky, we might be looking forward to a decade or more of a stopmo film coming out ever year or two.
This would be an excellent thing because -- (and this is a surprise ending to the essay that I didn't see coming) -- what I think we desperately need is more big name directors who have an affinity for the stopmo artform... Because right now, all we've got is Tim Burton, Henry Selick, Nick Park, and Wes Anderson.
If the big studios commit to producing stopmo product, then some new blood might have a chance to rise to the top ranks... And once the directors have had a chance to taste the process of making stopmo films, how can they not wind up pushing to do even more of them?
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: stopmo, writing
January 4, 2008
A Word From Professor Ichbonnsen
by sven at 2:52 pm
I just finished a short-short new film: "A Word From Professor Ichbonnsen."
This was a submission for the StopMoShorts.com quarterly Stopmo Haiku Challenge. The challenge is that SMS provides four keywords -- in this case realm, swap, alley, and rose -- and you have to make a short film that works in one or more of them. I chose to go with the word "realm."
The deadline was Dec. 31... And I managed to get my project uploaded a good 40 minutes before midnight. ;-) At SMS, "A Word From Professor Ichbonnsen" (AKA the Monster Month TV Ad) can be viewed here.
I feel I should explain that this project didn't start out as a commercial. Toward the end of December I had already fabricated the set and the puppet version of Ichbonnsen (no, that's not the man himself!)... I wanted to shoot a quick gag about the Professor encountering the creature from the book cover -- but ran out of time for constructing a decent monster puppet.
I was contemplating giving up on doing a short -- when it occurred to me that it would be funny to see Ichbonnsen holding a miniature copy of the book, waving it around. The book prop was much easier to make... So I went with it.
To me, the film stands on its own. The fact that there actually IS a Monster Month book for sale simply deepens the pleasure of the fantasy world.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (3) | categories: bestiary, stopmo
December 28, 2007
stopmo aesthetics
by sven at 12:35 am
On 12.22.07 Neil Gaiman released a sneak peek at the upcoming Coraline film that Henry Selick and Laika are producing. The clip is astonishing. For a particular style of stopmo, it's establishing a new standard for perfection.
However, the animation is so good it's rather disconcerting. At first, a lot of people aren't sure if they're looking at stopmo or CG. Both among friends and at SMA, there's a discussion going on about the "hand-made look" versus the "CG look" and which one each of us prefers.
I'm troubled, because there are tangled undertones in these conversations: Resentment that Laika is setting a standard that no hobbyist will ever be able to match. A reactionary sense of superiority, that stopmo which bears the marks of human imperfection has more soul. A sense of betrayal, because Coraline's aesthetic is reminiscent of CG... Because among stopmoes, CG is the bad guy: it literally killed the use of stopmo for photo-realistic monster effects (e.g. Jurassic Park, King Kong) -- and seems to have a strangle-hold on mainstream cinema that keeps stopmo in general marginalized.
Me, I'm very interested in the visual style that's being established for Coraline. I'm excited to discuss it with other people... But I want a more expansive conversation than "hand-made" vs. "CG." The way that I see it, the spectrum of stopmo aesthetics is much broader than that.
So this is how I'm choosing to respond to the discussion -- with an essay that considers eight or more distinct stopmo aesthetics.
I. MOTHER ART FORMS
While there may be earlier precursors, stopmo is an art form that was essentially developed during the 20th century. It's new. So naturally, visual styles have been borrowed from other art forms. That's my thesis: stopmo has borrowed its various "looks" from other arts.
I feel this is a pretty easy idea to demonstrate... Off the top of my head I can think of quite a few films whose influences are blatant. But, of course, there are going to be plenty of films that are more difficult to categorize. Artists, being who we are, like to mix and match.
Also, besides "mix and match," I think that stopmo styles evolve through a sort of "imitative drift." Certain artists establish a style which is much imitated -- but with each iteration, the concept becomes mutated (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse). The Rankin & Bass look is a good example. It established a recognizable style... Which people are still copying today -- sometimes embellishing upon it, sometimes just making shoddy rip-offs.
OK, so let's consider the spectrum of aesthetics. Here are the the mother art forms that I've been able to identify:
- Puppetry
- Cartoons
- Miniatures / Models / Dolls
- Assemblage / Found Objects
- Photo Realism
- Living Toys
- CG / Vinyl
- 2D Illustration
1. Puppetry
Eastern Europe, particularly Czechoslovakia, has a strong tradition of puppetry. Stopmo films coming from the Czechs (particularly older films) have the flavor of marionette shows without the strings. The puppet heads are made from carved wood, the story-telling feels like it's based on the traditions of live performances of puppetry, rather than cinematic conventions...
Example: Jiri Trnka
2. Cartoons
Some stopmo films attempt to be a traditional cartoon film -- but in 3D. What is the "cartoon look"? Probably the most distinguishing "cartoony" quality is that the film's world seems to be made entirely out of squishy-springy rubber. This look usually has an emphasis on squash-and-stretch. Sometimes you can see puppet designs even imitating the "ball and rubber-hose" construction of early black and white cartoons (e.g. Steamboat Willie).
Example: Will Vinton's "Noid" (for Dominos Pizza)
3. Miniatures / Models / Dolls
There's a tradition of trying to make exact replicas of real world objects -- only in miniature. Think of dioramas that you see in museums, model ships, and fancy doll houses. Some stopmo tries to accomplish just this. There might be slight stylizations -- but these are incidental. The artist has tried to copy the look of the real world in miniature to the best of their ability.
Example: Nick Hilligoss' "Good Riddance" series
4. Assemblage / Found Objects
There is a sculptural tradition of making "assemblages" out of found objects. Some stopmo films derive from this aesthetic. The worlds we peek into look as if they are built of dust, old wood, broken bits of machinery... If there are "puppets" at all, they aren't intended to fool us into believing they're creatures with souls. Even when human-shaped puppets are moving, the footage looks like "object animation." The puppet animation seems to be an extension of the original impulse to make recognizably inanimate objects move, rather than an attempt to make miniature actors give a performance.
Examples: Svankmajer, The Brothers Quay
5. Photo-Realism
Photo-realistic stopmo descends from trick photography, like the old supposed photographs of fairies. The point is to make stopmo footage which will blend seamlessly with live actors. Unlike most stopmo, which gives us whole worlds, stopmo done with this aesthetic is usually interjected into live-action sequences. Its greatest success is when we can't tell where the live action ends and the stopmo begins.
Examples: Willis O'Brien, Ray Harryhausen, Phil Tippet
6. Living Toys
Who hasn't wished that their toys could come to life? Stopmo gives us the ability to make that happen. The puppets are appealing because they look like things that we own. (Which is different than film productions where toy tie-ins are made after the fact.) Maybe they're "girl toys" (stuffed animals, perhaps); maybe they're "boy toys" (e.g. collectible action figures). Both come from the same impulse.
Examples: Domokun, Robot Chicken
7. CG / Vinyl
Computer Generated animation has a recognizable look to it, which is the result of the tools used in its creation. Both the motions of the characters and the textures of their world are noticeably smooth. The CG look has a strong relationship with the use of vector graphics in the world of design and with the urban vinyl / designer toys movement (which sometimes uses 3D printers). In all three cases, these are images and objects that have been created using mathematical forms.
It's a fairly new phenomenon, but some stopmo seems to be trying to imitate the look of CG.
Examples: The Corpse Bride, Otafuku Rex
8. 2D Illustration
The world of illustration has countless visual styles (or at least, more than I've been able to wrap my mind around). Illustrations for comic books, children's books, magazines... Some stopmo attempts to capture the style of a 2D illustrator and translate it into a 3D living world. Rankin & Bass' "Mad Monster Party," for example, was an attempt to translate the works of artists who produced Mad Magazine. Or, consider "The Nightmare Before Christmas": it's based on a storybook written by Tim Burton... No animator would ever have initiated a character design as problematic as Jack Skellington's!
Examples: Rankin & Bass' Mad Monster Party, The Nightmare Before Christmas
II. MATERIALITY
It seems to me that the various stopmo aesthetics are clearly descended from other art forms: puppetry, cartoons, model-building, assemblage, photography, children's toys, computer animation, and 2D illustration. However, I would be remiss if I didn't also discuss the ways in which the materiality of stopmo also plays into its aesthetics.
Wood
Puppets with wooden heads are generally somewhat inscrutable. If they seem to have an internal emotional life, then this has to be conveyed with pantomime. Because wood puppets make for...wooden actors...there is an inherent distance between the "actors" and the audience. Rather than focussing on the puppets' internal worlds, the artist is compelled to tell broader stories where the characters are more archetypal -- fables and myths being apt material.
Clay
Squash and stretch is difficult to do with most puppet-making materials -- but it's very well suited to clay animation. Hence, there is a natural affinity between clay and the cartoon style. Similarly, cel-animation tends to use flat colors -- which again, is easily reproduced with clay.
Foam Latex
Foam latex is based on an organic material: latex sap is harvested from trees... Both liquid latex and foam latex do a good job of simulating flesh... Hence, they're well suited for the needs of Photo-Realistic animation, where the puppets are supposed to impersonate animals.
Resin
Casting resins are, in some ways, an evolutionary leap up from using wood for puppets. By doing detailed sculpts in clay, taking molds, and then making castings, much more complex shapes can be created. This process is well-suited to the needs of an artist who is trying to translate 2D illustrations into 3D puppets.
Silicone
Silicone, vinyl, and CG lend themselves to the needs of industrial production and mass-marketing. With these materials, you can design a character using vector mathematics, which can then be reproduced with absolute accuracy for either either film media, print media, or consumer-oriented toys. When you're mass-producing dreams, uniformity is is the goal...
III. PUPPET PHILOSOPHY: FROM THE LIVING DEAD TO THE ILLUSION OF LIFE
Visual aesthetics aren't merely surface styles -- they're also motivated by philosophies about what it is that we're trying to do with stopmo as an Art. (Yes, that's Art with a capital "A".)
Here are some questions to ponder: What is the purpose of the puppet? How emotionally close to or distant from the puppets should the audience feel? To what extent are animators breathing a soul into their characters -- versus eerily pushing around objects which were never alive and never will be?
It seems to me that there are a limited number of possible philosophies underlying the aesthetics of stopmo. Really I only see four.
1. Puppets Are The Living Dead
The Brothers Quay don't try to invest soul into their puppets. The dolls and assemblages of found objects which they move about in their films remain essentially inanimate. If they have a life, it is a life which we cannot understand -- if they have dreams, they are the dreams of scissors and broken dolls.
Animatronic dummies often are close to looking like humans -- and yet, narrowly fail in their impersonation in a way that creeps us out. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the "uncanny valley," a place which lies between laughable failure and success. At times, this is precisely where the Quays want to put the audience... The epitome of this thought is to animate meat: the object is not simply being animated -- it's being eerily reanimated.
2. Puppets Are Stand-Ins For Archetypes
With the wooden-headed czech puppets, there's no way to mistake the puppets for actual living things... And yet, we are intended to use our imaginations to project thoughts and feelings into the puppets. This is exactly the same experience that we have when watching a traditional puppet show. Having stopmo puppets move without strings merely removes some of the technicalities of puppetry (e.g. strings) which might otherwise distract us from the story's telling. Yet, even so, the burden of putting life into the puppets falls on the audience.
3. Puppets Are Trick Photography
When we watch photo-realistic foam latex monsters interacting with live action actors, the audience is meant to believe that the puppets are real living things. The audience shouldn't have to do any work investing life into the Kraken in Clash of the Titans -- Uncle Ray has managed to accomplish that illusion for us.
But what is Harryhausen's own relationship with the puppet? He's often talked about how the animator is like a magician, who shouldn't reveal how he accomplishes his tricks. The puppet is a prop, a special effect. Even when Ray makes one of his creatures give a convincing performance, at the end of the day his puppets are only meant to be a foil for the film's live-action protagonists.
4. Puppets Are Miniature Costumes
Henry Selick is known for treating his animators like actors, whose job is to deliver a performance. When you watch documentaries about the making of "Curse of the Were-Rabbit," you can see Nick Park acting out the mannerisms of different characters with his animators. The puppet is essentially a tiny costume which the animator puts on.
In this approach to stopmo, the whole point is for the artist to put themselves inside of the puppet's body. You're supposed to be able to physically feel in your own body the way that the puppet moves. It's an existentially unnerving experience: trading hours of time in your life to create seconds in the life of the puppet. You are very literally sacrificing some of your life, putting it into this inanimate object, in order to temporarily give it a soul.
IV. AN OBLIGATORY CLOSING STATEMENT
After this encyclopedic survey, I feel obliged to confess my own preferences.
Puppetry, cartoons, miniatures, assemblage, photo-realism, living toys, CG, 2D illustration... When I consider the stopmo films derived from each of these "mother art forms," I can usually find examples that are truly great. If there is no truly great film in a category yet, then I hold onto the hope that it simply hasn't been made yet. Thus I refuse to weigh in on the polarized "hand-made" versus "CG" debate.
As a multi-media artist-animator, I think my favorite visual aesthetic is Illustration. To me, beginning with drawings, and then creating a stylized, immersive fantasy world is the ultimate in creativity. That's what I want to do.
Consequently, I'm drawn to resin and foam latex as my primary fabrication materials. I want puppets that have been cast, because it gives me excellent control of visual details. Where possible, I'll use hard parts (resin), because it maintains its carefully sculpted form even better than a soft material. I am strongly attracted to the longevity of silicone for flexible areas of the puppet -- but the difficulties of giving its surface a painterly look are a significant hurdle.
In terms of puppet philosophy, I'm most drawn to dealing with puppets as if they are costumes and I am the actor. This shouldn't be too surprising -- in general most people are attracted to narrative stories with strong protagonists and linear, comprehensible plots. I do have an irrational fondness for monsters... But for me, wanting to connect with the emotions and inner worlds of characters is even more important.
In conclusion: My hope is that having read this far, fellow animators will get some sparks of inspiration that help them to better triangulate their own aspirations for art-making... And in the process also find greater tolerance/empathy for folks who are pursuing aesthetics different from their own.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (6) | categories: stopmo
December 23, 2007
stopmo set-building: hills
by sven at 3:30 am
I've done very little set-building. So I'm trying some things out. Tonight's experiment: rather than have Ichbonnsen standing on a perfectly flat stage, I thought I'd throw in some little hills.
What kind of look am I going for? Something with clean lines and colors that you'd see on children's TV... Sorta like Domokun or Colargol (AKA Jeremy the Bear).
The stage is 1/4" thick MDF (Medium Density Fiberboard) from Home Depot. On top of this, I hot-glued a few pieces of insulation foam. This is a concept I picked up from a book on building terrain for miniature war games.
I carved the foam into shape using a carving knife, a craft knife, and a flexible blade that's sold for use with polymer clays.
I picked up some luscious green fleece last month (?) thinking it would make awesome grass for a set at some point. I painted the foam and MDF with a layer of Elmer's glue, and then simply draped the cloth over the whole thing. I cut away the excess, leaving a little extra for safety.
Next: I'm thinking about some trees...
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: stopmo
December 10, 2007
the business of stopmo: a primer and a manifesto
by sven at 11:59 pm
[Reprinted from a thread I started at StopMotionAnimation.com... This is an essay I wrote in response to the "How about it - can we make a little scratch in today's digital media environment?" thread, here.]
OK, let's get down to basics... Givens: (1) You're a person who loves filmmaking. (2) You want to make money while doing it. ...What we're talking about here is running a business.
1. PRODUCT & INVENTORY
So, let's think like we're running a business. First off, you need a product to sell. Your product is your film. But filmmaking isn't like painting, where you would ever sell the original... We're in the business of selling copies. I'm going to assume that means making DVDs.
If you were a world-renowned painter who could sell a single painting for $20,000, maybe you could earn a year's worth of living expenses with one sale. No one's going to buy a DVD for $20,000 though...
So, it looks like you're going to need to sell many DVDs in order to make this endeavor profitable. That means keeping inventory on hand. Suppose for the moment that you want a hundred copies available for sale. Right now I can see three options:
(1) buy a stack of blank DVDs, cases, and labels for about $100 total and deal with production and order-fulfillment yourself;
(2) have a professional service burn the discs and print the labels for you, at a cost of ~$7.50 each, therefore $750 total (different deals will vary);
(3) use a print-on-demand service like lulu.com, which allows you to produce each DVD when it is ordered -- and which will take care of fulfilling orders for you, too -- thus, an out-of-pocket cost of $0.
[Personally, I know which means of production I want to pursue. ;-) ]
Let me point out that most of the folks on SMA don't even get this far in terms of creating their stopmo business model... Which drives me nuts! Here we have a message board full of stopmo enthusiasts -- the people most likely in all the world to buy a stopmo film -- and we don't even make it possible to buy films from each other! I'd love to buy DVDs from Nick, Lio, Strider, Paul, Mysterious Ron, Jriggity, Toggo... I'll stop there -- but you get my drift.
Folks, I WANT to buy your films -- but I can't, because there's no physical product there to buy! PLEASE, pick a means for producing some inventory, even if it's just home-burned DVDs, and make them available to me!
2. BUDGET & INITIAL INVESTMENT
OK, so let's assume that you want to be in the business of creating DVDs to sell. You first got into this art because you love it, not in order to make money -- so to make the transition, you're going to have to change your perspective and start thinking about the budget.
Here's the challenge that every maker of art must face: in order to make a profit, you have to bring in more money than you spent on creating your product. Easy enough -- except for one horrifying glitch: stopmo is astronomically expensive to produce!
How expensive? Let's look at a hypothetical 5-minute film and talk about what your initial investment is.
Tools of the trade, a computer and camera, you probably owned anyway -- so I'm willing to ignore those. Sculpey, aluminum armature wire, plaster, wood... I'll bet you could make a fine looking 5-minute film for under $100 in material costs. Even if you move up to foam latex and silicone, the material costs probably won't kill you...
It's TIME that's the killer. How many hours does it take to make a stopmo film, when you consider both fabrication and animating? Let's say you work at 12fps, and can pose a frame every 2.5 minutes. That's 2 seconds of film produced per hour. A five minute film, then, takes 150 hours to shoot. Fabrication usually takes longer than shooting the film itself -- I usually estimate 3 times as long -- so, we'll say that this 5 minute film takes 600 hours total to make.
If you were paying yourself a bit better than minimum wage, say $10 per hour, that means this hypothetical 5 minute film is going to cost you $6100 to create. That's how much money you're going to have to make back, just to break even!
Oh, I could talk about cutting corners at this point -- using cheaper materials, stories with fewer characters, filming at a lower fps... But who am I kidding? If you don't love the film, you're not going to go through the hell of creating it. Just accept that, yes, stopmo is painfully expensive to create.
3. PRICING, PRICE POINT, & VOLUME
Pricing is not guess work. It's math. Deal with it. Embrace it. It's not that damned hard.
If you were making one-of-a-kind paintings, this is the formula you would use to price your products: cost of materials + cost of labor + mark-up to whatever the market is willing to pay.
The accepted price point (what people are willing to pay) for feature-length DVDs is $10-$25. People might be willing to pay less than that, but they're not going to pay more. Your film is only 5 minutes long, so you're going to be doing pretty well if you can get people to spend $10...
But, if you sell just one copy of your film for $10, you've just made negative $6090. ...Which is why you're in the business of selling DVD copies, not the original. (Duh.)
OK, let's set our sights on just breaking even. Let's say that you use an online print-on-demand service, where it costs $7.50 to produce a DVD -- but whatever you charge on top of that is money that goes to you. If you can sell your DVDs for $10 each, that means you're raking in $2.50 each...
Which means it's an easy calculation to figure out how much volume we need to move. To make back your initial investment of $6100, you're going to have to sell 2440 copies.
Ouch.
And to make a modest living of $20,000 per year? That's another 8000 copies that you're going to want to move.
Double-ouch.
4. SELLING OUT
I assume that the people I'm writing this for are artists. We have visions that we want to share on film. However, we also have craft skills that we can sell... Which, sadly, is a much more profitable route to go.
As far as I can see, there are four ways to try to make money while doing stopmo:
(1) make your own film and sell DVD copies;
(2) work as an animator/fabricator at a studio that does stopmo;
(3) start your own stopmo studio, which produces and sells TV commercials and music videos to companies with deep pockets (deep because they're moving huge volumes of their own products);
(4) create a film and sell it to a media company that makes its profits either by distributing a catalog of films, or which broadcasts content and makes its real money off ad revenue.
I've done a little bit of freelance work for a local stopmo studio... If I recall, I was making $15/hour before taxes. Freelance work, kinda by definition, isn't steady... But suppose I wanted to make $20,000 a year doing that. If we assume that taxes are going to take about a third of my pay before it even reaches me, then it's easy to figure out that I'm going to need to work for 2000 hours each year. ...Which translates into fifty weeks of 40 hours each.
Nice work if you can get it... But of course, that's not going to leave a lot of time in your life to make that hypothetical 5-minute film I mentioned earlier, which would take 600 hours to produce (fifteen 40-hour weeks).
Running your own stopmo studio, you can get big money coming in, which hypothetically you can channel into a side project -- possibly making a film even with the help of other animators... But the level of complexity grows too, in terms of getting people their paychecks, dealing with insurance, etc... Well, I don't know enough to go that route.
Plus, if your own studio could make a film, you'd still have to find a media company that will buy it for distribution. At that level, you're not going to risk making a film before finding a buyer -- you're going to court potential buyers with a pitch, and try to sell them on investing in you up front.
Are there media companies interested in buying short films from people who've already created a product? Probably. But I don't personally know anything about them. All I can do is ask: How much is any particular company -- who is primarily interested in their own profit -- likely to pay for 5 minutes worth of content? ...$50? $500? $2000?
Maybe broadcast media are different -- but if the company in question sells DVDs, then they'd be subject to the same math that we talked about earlier: To earn $20,000, they'd have to move 10,440 copies.
Granted, they can probably get volume discounts during production -- but that's still a truly phenomenal number of units to sell when your product only lasts 5 minutes. ...And did I mention that your royalties are going to be skimmed off the top? Probably something like 25 or 50 cents per unit?
OK, now that we've taken a fairly in-depth look at the options for making things to sell, I want to turn attention to consumers -- the people you're going to try to sell your products to.
5. MARKETS ARE EITHER GROWING OR SHRINKING
Let's start with the big picture.
Markets don't simply exist -- they grow or they shrink. ...And, in my opinion, we have it in our power to help make the size of the stopmo audience go in either direction.
I believe that at the heart of every consumer movement there is a core of die-hard enthusiasts. Be their passion for stamp-collecting or for Harley-Davidson motorcycles, wherever there's a shared passion, you've got the seed for a money tree. For stopmo, that essential core of enthusiasts is us -- the 6000-odd lurkers and contributors at SMA.
Look at science fiction. Back in the 30s it was viewed as badly-written kid stuff, not to be taken seriously. It was printed on pulp paper, the cheapest material available, because both the paper and the content was so disposable. Sci fi films have followed a similar path -- look back at attitudes in the 60s -- before 2001 and Star Wars -- when it was all B-movie stuff, not taken seriously by the general public. Where is sci fi now? It's a huge force in the book publishing industry, and it's raking in billions of dollars world-wide in the sale of films. Why? The enthusiasts were determined and won out.
More recently, look at how anime has taken root in the US. It wasn't very long ago that it was just a handful of enthusiasts who even knew what anime is... Now, go into Best Buy, and there are shelves of the stuff for sale.
Why can't the same thing happen with stopmo? In Eastern Europe, the puppet film tradition (I'm told) has a long heritage and continues to thrive. It's a different culture, with stronger ties to traditional puppetry... But even so, why couldn't it happen here too?
6. HOW TO SELL SHORT FILMS
Stopmo certainly can sell. Wallace and Gromit, the Nightmare Before Christmas, Robot Chicken... People are hungry for this stuff.
It seems to me that the real problem that we have in terms of marketing our own home-brewed stopmo films is length. In my opinion, a DVD is generally supposed to provide between 45-minutes and 2-hours worth of entertainment. If I buy a 5-minute stopmo film on DVD for $10, I definitely feel like I'm doing the author a bit of a favor. Mind you, it's a favor that I'm eager to do, because I love the art form.
I want to point out that stopmo is not the only art form that suffers from issues of scale. How about short stories? You can sell a short story in the form of a chapbook -- but generally you're going to have a challenging time selling to anyone besides other short-story enthusiasts.
Even more generally, I'd like to point out that MOST artists are starving artists. Poets, novelists, painters, sculptors, makers of short live-action films... We all have to struggle with the time-invested vs. income-generated equation.
Short stories, though, I think are a particularly good analogy for stopmoes to look at. How do you sell a short story? Put it in an anthology.
A DVD anthology of good looking films, in attractive packaging? That could sell.
Enough units to make back what you spent on making your film? Um, honestly probably not. But I'm willing to bet that a 30 minute DVD that contains six five-minute shorts can at least sell more volume than those six films could if they were packaged independently.
7. THE MARKET BEGINS WITH ME
Stopmoes... We love this art form with a crazy intensity. We'll eat up whatever gets produced. And yet we aren't even making our films into physical products and selling them to each other!
The way I see it, we need to stop imagining cinderella stories: starving artist gets swept away by producer prince and lives happily ever after in the castle of film distribution. Instead, we need to take power into our own hands. With home DVD-burners and online print-on-demand services, we now have the means of inexpensively producing the very products that we ourselves want to buy.
Imagine if you will a DVD compilation title "the best of StopMotionAnimation.com"... Pretty sweet, huh?
Then, if we as a community were to continue developing in this direction -- insisting that our projects become actual products, and pressing to make the best single-short DVDs and anthology DVDs we can -- well, then how can we fail to begin attracting a broader audience?
8. A MANIFESTO FOR STOPMO FILMMAKERS
Time to wrap this up. And here's where I step up onto my wooden crate marked "manifesto-brand soaps"...
We who love stop-motion animation and who want to see its influence in the world grow, we must:
(1) Take responsibility for turning our filmmaking projects into more than a just hobby, but rather a business. (Even if it loses money.)
(2) Produce DVD versions of our films, and at the very least make them available for sale to other stopmo enthusiasts.
(3) Gather our short films together into anthologies, which make film-viewers feel like they are getting full-value for their entertainment dollar.
(4) Begin expanding the market for stop-motion animation, first by making our products available to other stopmo enthusiasts, and then by drawing others into the passion.
(5) Keep making films. Because if we don't give the audience products to buy frequently enough, their shopping attention won't stay engaged, and they'll just wander away.
And in my best inspirational seminar voice:
We're all in this together folks, so let's "get down to business" -- and really get to work.
[End of speech. You'll find copies of my book in the lobby. I'll be available for signing after a brief intermission... :-P ]
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: stopmo, writing
November 16, 2007
lip-sync test 2
by sven at 1:30 am
I went back and edited my first lip-sync to create a new version. I wound up changing 4 frames (out of 41) for this new clip... "Professor Ichbonnsen lives!"
Justin's comment about doubling Fs, Ms, & Bs rang a bell... He was repeating something I'd read in The Animator's Survival Kit:
"The important consonants are the closed ones -- B, M, P, F, T, V. In order to read these positions we need at least two frames. One isn't enough. (If we don't make these positions the vowel that follows will be vitiated.)" (p.306)
So, I elongated the "b" in "Ichbonnsen" to two frames, and it helped a lot.
The vowels still looked a bit long -- so I also shortened the "o" in "Ichbonnsen" by having "nn" hit sooner, and the "i" in "lives" by having the "v" hit sooner.
I know that the "b" in "Ichbonnsen" is a small explosion of air, and that I'm supposed to pop from a closed mouth to a wide open mouth... But it the leap felt too big. Perhaps because the Prof is talking fast, and shouldn't be articulating his speech too much? So I opted to change one of my "b" frames into an inbetween (the mouth shape for "r" seemed to fit).
I'm still a bit fuzzy about phrasing. I know that a lot of speech gets slurred together -- but how to intelligently condense the mouth forms?
posted by sven | permalink | comments (7) | categories: stopmo
November 15, 2007
first lip-sync test
by sven at 2:28 pm
Here's my first true lip-sync test. Notes:
- I shot 15fps. The "o" in "Ichbonnsen" is jarring to my eye... Does it come in too soon? Did I need another inbetween in order to get to that shape? Is it just holding still for too long? (The "i" in "lives" is also a bit off -- but not as badly.)
- The stickers' corners want to pop up, and they cast shadows. Grrrr.
- It's hard to keep the head perfectly in place when you're trying to press stickers onto it.
- I thought I'd be clever and put the stickers on a piece of clear acetate, sitting on top of a photocopy of the mouth forms -- making it easy to select what I want to use. It turns out, though, that the stickers adhere rather well to acetate. I'll have to try semi-translucent wax paper next.
- I bumped one of the clip lamps. The placement of the one on the right, at least, is going to have to be re-thunk.
- the camera was very slowly leaning forward during the shoot. I must not have locked off the head tightly enough.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (5) | categories: stopmo
November 14, 2007
new puppet: professor ichbonnsen
by sven at 11:00 pm
I've just finished up a new puppet: Professor Ichbonnsen!
I wanted to try some new puppet-making techniques, baby-step improvements on the basic Dad and Jimmy designs... A new puppet to play with on my new stage.
This pup didn't start off as Professor Ichbonnsen... But I think it's probably close enough. (Looks a bit more like Johnny Depp than I'd like... But oh well.) I have some ideas for the December SMS stopmo haiku challenge that involve the Prof. Wink.
Here are the gory details about how I built the guy.
THE HEAD
The head is detachable. At the base of the skull, there's a 1/2" long 7/32" piece of K&S. A 3/16" (6/32") piece of K&S at the end of the neck fits into the slot.
I've standardized the size of K&S that I use for this kind of plug-in. My choices are based on using 1/4" dia. balls as the default in ball&socket armatures. For a 1/4" ball, you're going to use a 1/8" rod. If you want to attach that rod into squarestock, it can't be any smaller than 3/16" wide -- that leaves 1/32" on either side of the hole (precise drilling work, but you don't have to break out a micrometer). The walls of K&S are 1/64" thick -- so to have the square stock plug in, you need a piece that's 7/32" wide.
A diagram would help... But it'll have to wait til another day.
The head is made out of Super Sculpey that has been sculpted around a core of tin foil. Using tin foil means that the Sculpey isn't as thick, doesn't need to be baked as long, and is less likely to crack. Tin foil also keeps the head light enough so that it won't tip the puppet over.
On my Percy 5 puppet, I used wooden eyeballs painted with acrylics. They tended to stick in their sockets more than I'd like. This time, I tried using acetal plastic balls for eyes. You can get them via Marc Spess at animateclay.com ("delrin" is the brand name); I got mine directly from smallparts.com.
I drilled holes in the balls, put them on toothpicks, put the toothpicks into a drill, and spun them while I painted the pupils, so the pupils would be nice and round. Acrylic paints don't adhere to acetal well, so I used enamel paints (Testor brand, the stuff you use for model kits). The balls turn in the sockets quite well. I added a dab of vaseline in the sockets, though, to help keep the eyes from falling out.
For this particular puppet, I was going for a look similar to the Rankin & Bass puppets in Mad Monster Party... Since I made the head (back on Sept 20), I've realized that I broke the formula somewhat. Almost universally, puppets that have hard heads will have eyes that are built into the sculpt. Freely rotating eyeballs are only used when the head is made out of a soft material: clay, liquid latex, foam latex, silicone.
The head was painted with acrylics: "bambi brown" + white. I applied the paint with a cosmetic sponge, which gave the head a really nice texture.
The hair is actually yak fur, which I found at Sportsman's Warehouse in the aisle of materials for making fishing lures. I glued down small tufts of hair using Fabri-Tac, working from the center of the scalp outward. I used hair gel to make sure the hair will all stay in place. I cleaned up the hair line a little with dabs of black paint.
My intent is to do lip-sync using mouths that have been photocopied onto sticker paper. The mouth the Prof is wearing right now is photocopied out of Preston Blair's classic book, Cartoon Animation. After reviewing four books (Blair, Williams, Shaw, Priebe) and two lip-sync softwares (Magpie, Papagayo), I decided that Blair's breakdown of the visemes makes the most sense, and is the best place for a beginner to start.
THE FEET
For the feet, I used knurled brass thumbnuts for the tie-downs. I attached the thumbnuts to the wire armature using 20 minute plumber's epoxy putty. Then, I sculpted shoes over the tie-downs using Magic Sculp (an epoxy clay designed for scupltors).
On the Dad puppet I used Sculpey for the feet -- and it wound up shattering. Since hands and feet are subject to a lot of stress, I decided to go with epoxy clays this time -- which are much sturdier.
One mistake I made on the Dad and Jimmy puppets was having the ankle wire coming out the backside of the foot. This time I was careful to have the leg wire coming up out of the top of the foot.
One side of the knurled nut is shaped like a funnel, while the other side's flat. Pointing the funnel toward the floor makes it easier to get your tie-down screw screwed in.
Magic Sculp has a 3-4 hour working time. To speed up curing, I put it in the oven at 175 degrees for 30 minutes. [The studio oven isn't used for food.]
I'm really pleased with how the shoes came out... I sculpted the line where the shoe's sole attaches, and the rim of the shoe (where you can just see a little bit of sock). The shoes did stick to the wooden base -- but I was able to cut them off using a blade.
THE BODY
Not much different in terms of how I did the body this time... I'm finding that I'm frustrated with foam build-up, though. I want more definition of the body -- even if it's going to be hidden under clothes. The Prof is essentially symmetrical on the dorsal/ventral plane... He needs a butt. And curvature to the spine.
I realize that I could get a little more definition if I used snip foam... But using spray glue is a sticky pain. My "mummy wrap" method is certainly good for "quick and dirty"... If I'm going to put more effort into shaping the body, though, I think I'm going to be happiest with a casting process.
All parts of the armature use three strands of 1/16" aluminum armature wire twisted together. I twisted them together using a method Marc Spess recently demonstrated on a youtube video... You put one end of the wires into a vise, and the other end into a drill chuck. (I found the drill had an easier time holding the wire if I taped the ends together.)
I used the drill method for twisting the wire for Moon Baby... Whose arm broke. That put me off the drill method for a while; but now I'm pretty sure that I over-twisted the wire -- shortening its life. So, I'm back to the drill method now.
One of the things that I'm liking about it is how it gives you a long straight rod. Whatever I don't use is easily kept for later.
Previously I've made my armatures with three lengths of twisted wire: the legs, the arms, and the spine/neck. The problem with this method was that looping the spine around the arm length innevitably made my puppet shorter than I intended.
Marc Spess does the spine and neck as separate bits... So I decided to try that out this time. Untwist the end of your twisted wire, and then wrap the ends around the arms (or legs). This wad of wire gets covered up with epoxy putty, so it doesn't matter how ugly it gets.
The armature was closer in scale to my sketch than usual, so I think doing the neck and spine as separate pieces is a keeper.
I added limb "bones" to the basic armature, as usual. It's quick, and works well.
Even so, I'm looking forward to trying something different on my next armature. I want to try using sections of K&S for the bones, like Susannah Shaw demonstrates. Now that I have a mini cut-off saw, cutting K&S is a breeze...
And this go around, epoxy glue suddenly started making sense to me. The difference this time is that I've got a supply of toothpicks and craft sticks within arm's reach; the one little plastic stirring rod they give you with the kit was confounding me previously.
Assembling an armature out of K&S, armature wire, and epoxy glue may take a bit longer -- but the precision is appealing, and I'm looking forward to not having putty gunk building up on my gloves while I work.
I wrapped the armature with 1/4" thick cushion foam, which I cut into strips that are about 1" wide. I'm still using a supply that I got for cheap at Scrap... When it runs out, though, I've located Fabric Depot as a reliable supplier.
The foam gets covered with athletic underwrap. Love this stuff!
THE CLOTHES
The head took 5.25 hours to make. The body took 6.5 hours. The clothes took 9... And I'm still thinking that I want an overcoat for the Professor.
Significance: It looks like making puppet clothes may wind up taking just as long as it did to make the rest of the puppet! So, I've got myself a book on making clothing for dolls, and am putting some energy into figuring out how to better manage this part of the fabrication process...
The Prof's clothes are nearly identical to the ones I made for Dad. The one main difference is that I decided to hem everything this time. Dad looked good at the beginning of filming... But by the end, his edges were beginning to fray.
Very useful: A miniature iron produced by Clover Needlecraft, Inc. I found mine at Collage on Alberta street. Folks who are into encaustics tend to use this tool.
Apparently there are two main approaches to creating patterns: either you start by working on paper, and then modify your plans with successive drafts -- or you start by draping cloth over your subject/victim, and begin pinning/sewing from there. I'm mostly using the "draping" approach.
The sleeves are the easiest part: they're basically just cloth tubes. To hem my cloth I iron a fold and then seal it in place with a line of Fabri-Tac glue.
Wherever an edge of cloth is going to get covered up by another piece, I leave the edge ragged. The cuff, for example, is a separate piece of fabric that's hemmed on three edges which covers up the ragged end of the sleeve.
For the sleeves, the front and back of the shirt, and the pant legs, I found that you can start with a rectangle of cloth and then modify it until it's about right. The fit isn't exactly what you'd get if you had a more sculpted pattern -- but it's adequate for now... Knowing that I can begin with a rectangle makes things relatively easy.
Check out how gnarly the shirt back was... All the edges get covered by other pieces of cloth -- so it doesn't matter!
The shirt front needed to be much more precise. It started as a rectangle, then I folded the arm holes, ironed them, glued the hems down... You get the picture.
The shirt collar is a separate piece of cloth. So is the strip down the front where buttons go.
Getting the pant legs right is awkward. I do each leg with one piece of fabric, and have the seam fall on the inside of the leg.
I put a piece of tape around the belly to help me keep track of where the waist line is supposed to be. I glue the waist in place first. Then I glue the butt in place. Then the bottom cuff. Then I glue the inseam down. That order seems to make things work out fairly OK.
I'm really pleased with a few details...
The buttons are 1/8" dia. pieces of black cardstock that I made with a hole-punch. Then: I used a needle to give them button holes.
The belt is real leather. It goes through a rectangular belt buckle that I made out of cardstock. The belt loops were cut from a thin, hemmed strip of cloth. I put the strip over a cardboard form and used my mini iron to sculpt it into shape. The iron liquifies the Fabri-Tac, essentially plasticizing the cloth. [I wear a respirator and have the windows wide open while I do this.]
It feels like the Prof ought to have a big overcoat. And maybe a fedora. He's looking a little more Goth than Monster Hunter right now. Giving him eyebrows and maybe some oil clay eyelids might also help.
For the coat I've got some black velvet that Shelley gave me. I could use felt -- but for the scale, velvet seems to look better. I'm nervous about cutting this fabric, so I'm putting more work into creating a paper pattern... Which is challenging. As is, the Prof has some decent body definition; I don't want it to be completely obliterated by a floppy, formless coat.
Next on the list: Lip-sync tests... Painting a backdrop and building some trees... A Scarlet puppet?
posted by sven | permalink | comments (7) | categories: stopmo
September 18, 2007
trying out the new stage
by sven at 10:35 pm
Sunday night I did a little throw-away animation to give the new stage a try. This is also the first time I've actually worked with the Drifter armature. Man... I haven't pushed a puppet since March. (And it shows.)
Some notes...
The Animation
Pretty simple: I just did a few poses with pauses inbetween. After moving the arms around a little, I realized that the armature looked dead from the chest down, so I decided to do something where there's shifting of weight. I was sort of going for that thing that Neo does in The Matrix, where he gestures to "bring it on" with his hand. Doesn't really work though when the armature's arms end at the wrist!
The Armature
Initially I had the joints tensioned really tight -- but given the joint problems in this armature, that made it almost un-animatable. So I loosened them all up... But a little too much. Toward the end of the clip the armature collapsed at the hip. Trying to recreate a pose is never fun.
The shoulders have worse range of motion than I'd thought. I knew when I built The Drifter that they were double-jointed -- that's an intentional mistake, because I wanted to feel how this design plays. The unforseen problem comes when you raise the arms up from the sides and then try to swing them to the front (as if to make the thumbs touch). When I do that, the outer shoulder joint binds, and the swinging motion is happening purely in the joints that come directly off the shoulder blocks. Pretty unrealistic.
Given the difficulties of range of motion and loss of tension, I'm beginning to favor wire armatures again. The problems of wire breakage and spring-back are perhaps preferable... Not to mention how much quicker fabrication goes!
The Stage
The stage, being steel, doesn't have the same give as MDF. When I tighten the thumb nuts on my tie-downs, it can be hard to get them tight enough... And then when I try to take them off, they can get stuck. Irritating -- but workable.
I found that I wanted the computer as close to where I was filming as possible -- so I put it up on a box, right next to the stage. I find that I'm paying more attention to the screen than to the puppet, though. I have a pair of surface gauges coming in the mail from MicroMark; hopefully they'll help break me of this bad habit.
It may be that I'm relying too much on the framegrabber also because the camera is in the way of my really getting in close to the puppet. I'm using a digital video camera which has pretty good zoom; I ought to try moving the cam back a few more feet from the table to open up some work space.
I clamped my power squid to the table... A small detail, but it sure is nice not having to crawl around on the floor! There's always going to be a minumum of three cords: for the computer, the camera, and at least one light. I think clamping my main power cord to the table's going to become standard practice.
Frame Rate
I shot at 15fps, which has generally been my default, since my intended medium is always television.
However, did you know that the U.S. Congress has mandated that on February 17, 2009 all analog broadcasts will cease? After that point, all transmissions must be digital. Meaning: if at that point you haven't bought either a digital TV or a digital-to-analog converter box, your television will be useless.
I'm doing research right now on digital television specifications, trying to figure out what stopmoes' new default should be for frame rate, resolution, and aspect ratio.
Seriously folks, killing analog TV is going to be big deal -- and a lot of people are going to be really pissed off when their expensive tube suddenly quits working. Best to start thinking about it now.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: stopmo
September 16, 2007
new stopmo stage
by sven at 5:50 pm
This week I built a new stage for doing stopmo animation.
Previously when I wanted to practice animating, I'd put a piece of pegboard on top of cinderblocks. That worked really well for a while -- it was a cheap and simple set up. However, while the pegboard works fine with 10-32 tie-down screws, it doesn't do so well with 4-40s (which are my new standard). Also, the cinderblocks were so heavy... It was becoming a burden to have to keep dissembling and reassembling the stage.
I wanted to come up with a new design. One that's lightweight, quick to assemble, and works with 4-40 tie-downs. See, I want to get all the little impediments out of my way -- so when I get into a mood to animate, I can just get right to it.
Here's the basic stage without add-ons. It's 2'x2' and about 9" tall. The wooden frame is made of struts that are .75"x1.5".
The stage surface is a piece of 16 gauge (1/16") mild steel perforated sheet with 1/8" holes. Susannah Shaw mentions these specifications as industry standard in England on p.88 of Stop Motion: Craft Skills for Model Animation. The reason for 1/8" holes? Because that size provides just the right amount of clearance for 4-40 tie-downs.
Perforated steel stages are more common in England than in the U.S. because animators there use magnets for tie-downs more often. Because the steel is perforated, I'll have the option of using either magnets or screws. (I haven't ever tried magnets, yet.)
I purchased the steel from this page at OnlineMetals.com, and had a really good experience. The metal cost $32.66, shipping options started at $9. I picked 2-day shipping and received the materials almost exactly 24 hours after I'd placed my order -- for just a hair under $50. Normally I'd go to my local branch of Metal Supermarkets to buy in person... However, when I called they didn't have any in stock -- and they didn't even get back to me with a quote ($72) until the next day... Half an hour before OnlineMetals actually delivered to my door!
When I received the metal, it was covered with a thin layer of oil, which was used as lubricant when the holes were being cut. I degreased the sheet using Citri-Solve, rinsed it with a hose, and toweled off the remaining water. The edges are sharp, so I covered them with black electrical tape. I've never seen 4-40 screws longer than about an inch; so in order to attach the metal to the wooden frame, I used 3" threaded rods and 4-40 thumb nuts, which I purchased locally at W.C. Winks Hardware.
A stopmo stage usually has to be heavy, in order to keep it from moving during the shoot. I'm using 2" C-clamps to clamp the stage to a folding table, thus depending on the weight of the table for my stability.
I designed the stage for animating while seated. Professionally, it seems that animation is nearly always done while standing up. Space-wise, however, that's not an option for most hobbyists (until they wind up converting their garage). The opening beneath the front of the stage is 6.5" tall, which gives comfortable clearance for my hands when I need to get at a puppet's tie-downs.
I built wooden lips on three sides of the stage to support set walls. The lips make it very easy to place a wall where you want it and then fix it in place with a single 2" C-clamp. This is a trick that I learned from Marc Spess' book Secrets of Clay Animation Revealed! -- which I highly recommend. (It's also available as an E-Book.)
The set walls I have pictured here are 2'x2' sheets of MDF (medium density fiberboard), 1/4" and 1/8" thicknesses. To keep the walls together where they meet at the top of the set, I'm using a 90-degree angle clamp (the sort which is used for making picture frames).
So, the set clamps onto a table... The walls clamp onto the base... You can also clamp on a post for lights, if you want.
I'm not sure yet how this is going to work out. When the light is so close to the puppets, I get a really bright hot spot. In most of the lighting set-ups that I've done so far, I wanted much more diffuse lighting.
An Early Design
Originally, I'd thought that the floor of the stage was going to be made from 1/4" MDF. I spent a good seven hours working on drilling holes before I realized just how insane this was.
I was inspired by Justin Rasch's dog pound set, which has hundreds of pre-drilled holes in the floor. From what I've seen on Justin's site, it seems like having pre-drilled holes -- instead of drilling during animation -- really allows you to just focus on performance.
Being me, though, I wanted things laid out in a neat grid. Having a 1/8" hole every quarter inch seemed about right -- like it would give me all the freedom I want.
I knew as I was going into this that I was taking on a task that would require outrageous patience... But I didn't do the math to realize that I was actually setting out to make about 7500 holes. (That's a 22"x22" area minus the corners where the frame prevents me from using tie-downs.)
Faced with another 7+ hours of drilling holes, spending $50 for a pre-drilled sheet of metal seemed like a real bargain!
One neat byproduct of the insanity, however, is that I invented this little device for starting holes. It's just a little piece of acrylic with a screw through it... But it's easier to hold and gives better visibility than when you use a screw and hammer alone -- and there's less strain on your joints than when you use a spring-loaded punch.
(You can see in the photos that I drilled 10-15% of the holes needed for the stage floor. What you probably can't see is that I'd already used my little tool to make hole-starting divots for 80-85% of the grid.)
Uses Of The New Stage
A stage that is 2'x2' is a bit small. You can't have a really panoramic wide shot. And you can't really have long tracking shot where a puppet walks very far. That's a limitation of this stage -- but I think the tradeoff of getting something that's easy to set up and which encourages me to practice animating makes up for it.
As I was putting this stage together, what I really had in mind was making a "black box theater." I'm interested in trying some animations where there isn't much of a set -- where you're just focussing on the performance of the "actors." I have a related idea (which I may or may not wind up pursuing) to create some generic, black-wrapped puppet bodies which can carry detachable heads... Sort of like actors wearing comedia dell'arte masks. (Which, now that I think about it, has a neat historical connection to Punch and Judy puppet shows.)
I'm not sure at this point to what extent using perforated steel for the stage floor is going to impede creating more elaborate sets. Can I only do hills, grass, etc. if I'm starting from scratch on a base of MDF? Maybe not. I might be able to cover the steel with cardstock and then build upward from there.
And as for wide shots: I have a suspicion that most scenes don't have characters walking too far...
I could see potentially building larger, more elaborate sets using a modular construction strategy. I could build more 2'x2' platforms that connect to and expand outward from my one perforated steel platform. So long as the characters don't have to walk past the edge of the steel plate (where the wooden frame prevents use of tie-downs), I'd be OK. ...And even then, maybe if I wanted characters to cross that boundary, I could just use a flying rig to support them.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (3) | categories: stopmo
June 27, 2007
see my films at PLATFORM on Friday
by sven at 3:38 pm
See my film work on the big screen this Friday -- FREE!
This week I'm attending the first PLATFORM International Film Festival, here in sunny (!) Portland. My short "The Great Escape" and the teaser-trailer for "Let Sleeping Gods Lie" will be shown during Friday night's open screening.
The show is at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts (1111 SW Broadway) -- on the fourth floor, in Brunish Hall. The open screening begins at 7:30pm, and is free and open to the public. I was the very first person to sign up -- so be here at 7:30 sharp or you'll miss it!
...
Oh, almost forgot! ...Tonight (Wednesday) there'll be a screening called "Portland Animation Showcase" at 9:00pm in the Whitsell Auditorium in the NW Film Center (1219 SW Park). A music video that I worked on is going to be shown: "Moodbot," directed by Rob Shaw. I made the armature that went inside the little girl puppet. You can get tickets at the door for $10.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (0) | categories: exhibits & events, let sleeping gods lie, stopmo
May 2, 2007
hand-drawn walk cycles
by sven at 11:50 pm
I sooo ought to be working on Let Sleeping Gods Lie... But when you're learning something new, it's so seductive...
Both of these clips could really use some in-betweens. I have to run them at 6fps to make them bearable. A better strategy for registration is also a must.
Used a light table for drawing this second clip. Did a master layout, then pencil drawings, then inked them on fresh 3x5" cards. (Which are more difficult to flip through than you'd think.)
The up position looks a little high, and the legs feel stiff -- probably because I'm not adding any twist to the feet. Feels like I'm not thinking right about how to construct animated characters yet. I know that I should be working with simple volumes...
Not sure if I want to pull out a ruler at this early stage. It feels like I'm being overly loose with joint placement. (It's been a long time since I did any drawing that wasn't just about capturing expressiveness and gesture.)
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: stopmo
April 30, 2007
side project: hand-drawn animation
by sven at 5:13 pm
I've started reading The Animator's Survival Kit again, after having put it down for about a year.
My jaw's been hanging floppy watching Justin Rasch learn how to animate puppets. Damn he's good! My suspicion is that he's going so fast and doing so well because he's done 2D animation in the past. Viewed frame-by-frame, I've noticed a few timing tricks in his clips that I know come out of the 2D tradition.
This observation clicked in my head with a little article over at AnimateClay.com, a simple way to get better sculpts.
"It’s very simple. If you draw something before you sculpt it, you have a better feel for it when you sit down to sculpt. It gives you a much better understanding of the shape, and feel of what you’re about to sculpt."
Since puppet animation is really just sculpting -- with the added dimension of time -- it seems like a "duh" that if I want to get better at stopmo, hand-drawn animation is actually the place to start.
Cross-fertilization, yo! ...'Cuz purists can only copy. If you want to learn how to make something new, then multi-disciplinary / mixed-media / synthesis / response is the only way to go!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: stopmo
April 12, 2007
casting in urethane foam
by sven at 8:00 am
On Monday and Tuesday I did my first casting using foam latex. That makes this an opportune moment to mention that last month (3/17) I also finally got around to trying out flexible expanding urethane foam.
I got this particular urethane from MonsterMakers.com. It's the self-skinning variety. Like with the foam latex experiments, I decided to use the two-part mold that I made for the flightless bird sculpt last year. Since my interest right now is in the material itself, I didn't bother to make a puppet armature.
I was hoping to be happily proven wrong... But as expected, the casting turns out to be too tough for animation purposes. It's like a Nerf football -- but with skin that's almost as tough as a basketball in places.
Urethane foam (I believe) has some of the same constituent chemicals as super glue. It'll stick to just about anything. So, before putting it into my mold, I painted the mold walls with liquid latex.
[That's a trick I read about in the StopMotionAnimation.com handbook... Although, re-reading the article now, I see that the latex trick is actually intended for non-skinning urethane. Oops.]
For the first pour, I mixed up 100 grams of component A and 50 grams of component B.
At first, it looked like I'd done a good job of estimating how much foam to mix. The material foamed up and came out of the feet... But then, to my surprise, it sank back down a ways.
I mixed up a second batch to fill in the soles of the feet: 20 grams of component A, 10 grams of component B. I figured that ought to be more than enough.
When I filled the feet, the foam rose up -- and then sank down again. Hm. The foam self-skins when it's against a mold wall... But I guess its surface tension breaks when in the open air. Curious.
It took some work to get the casting out of the mold. Definitely an effort -- but not terrible.
The latex skin didn't hold up very well. Particularly at the seam between the mold halves.
I just went ahead and peeled off all the latex. It came off easily. Unfortunately, the brush marks (from when I'd brushed the latex into the mold) all transfered to the urethane.
That being the case, I'm thinking that if I ever do flexible expanding urethane foam again, then I'll probably just use vaseline as my mold release -- and skip the latex.
The final product isn't bad -- if it were intended to be a static sculpture. The main flaw is a small bubble that got trapped at the end of the beak. [I probably ought to have rotated the mold.] The seam line is minimal.
Conclusion: This particular brand of urethane is useless for puppets -- unless, perhaps, they're very thin puppets. The material is just too tough.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: stopmo
April 11, 2007
foam latex - first attempt
by sven at 10:25 pm
Monday (4/09) I did my first run of foam latex. It was a complete failure. Not unexpected, but demoralizing nonetheless.
Yesterday I did my second foam run. The results (pictured above) are unusable -- but still an improvement.
Here's the original sculpt, which I did back in May 2006. Sort of a wingless bird creature.
And here's the mold that I'm working with, which I made last June. It's just been sitting around, waiting for me to get back to my line of research on casting materials.
Why am I getting back to this project now? Because I wasn't happy with the tentacles on my first elder thing puppet. I want to test some different materials -- and rather than go through the whole process of making a new mold, I figured I'd get through my first mistakes more quickly by just using the mold I already have.
For the same reason, I decided not to bother with making an armature right now. This is purely about figuring out how to get the foam latex to do what I want it to.
I bought a new mixing bowl and whisk attachment for my kitchen mixer that will be dedicated to foam latex. I covered the mixer's head with a plastic bag to help protect it from splashes. A plastic bag underneath the bowl would be a smart addition, too, next time.
I looked around several stores for a a cheap, digital combo-thermometer/hygrometer (humidity detector). I finally found this one at Walmart, which just what I was looking for. It cost about $8. (Radio Shack was a real disappointment -- they only carried a $40 model.)
First thing to do: dust the inside of the mold with mold release. I need to remember to pick up a big batch of cheap acid brushes at Harbor Freight... You go through a lot of them in most casting processes.
After the mold release dried, I took it out on the front porch and dusted out the extra with a chip brush. You know it's dry when it's turned from clear to white.
FIRST RUN
For my first foam run I decided to do a standard batch -- 150 grams of latex base -- so I could get a feel for how much that makes. The room temperature was 69 degrees, and humidity was 40% (it rained earlier in the day). I decided to go with the "normal room schedule" (68-72 degrees F).
The bad smell of foam latex is legendary. I wasn't all that impressed, though.
When you open up the canister, you get a strong smell of ammonia. If you've worked with liquid latex before, it's about the same.
When you bake the foam you get more of a sulphur smell, like eggs. It lingers in the room... But after airing out the studio and lighting up some vanilla candles, I think we'll be OK.
When I poured the first three ingredients into the mixing bowl, their level was about an inch below the bottom of the bowl's handle. When the foam reached peak volume, it had risen about halfway up the bowl's handle.
The foam gelled before I could get it into the mold. This was probably within a minute of turning off the mixer. I was trying to quickly brush some foam in with an acid brush, and then...
As I tried to see if I could quickly get at least some of the foam into the mold, it collapsed into a gummy wad, about the consistency of bread dough.
I noticed that the room temperature shot up to 72 degrees just during the last minute or two of the run (the thermostat turned on). That was probably a contributing factor.
SECOND RUN
Before I could do the second run, I had to clean out the mixing bowl, the whisk attachment, and the mold. I reapplied mold release.
The temperature was 68 degrees; humidity was 40%. I decided to decrease the refining period from 3 to 2 minutes, and the ultra-refining period from 3 to 2 minutes. I decreased the amount of gelling agent from 14 to 11 grams.
This go around I had enough working time. I quickly brushed foam onto the mold walls, then poured more in until each side was full. The foam had the consistency of whipped egg whites.
I strapped the mold shut... My straps are 13 feet long -- which is way too long. I used twist ties to try to keep the spare length out of the way.
The flightless bird is fairly bulky puppet; even so, I only used up between half and 2/3 of the material that I made. I estimate that there are between five and six 150 gram batches in my kit... So I've already used up a fair amount.
There was an area of foam at the very bottom of the bowl that never gelled. This suggests to me that there's an area there that the whisk doesn't reach... Good to know!
I baked the mold for four hours. I was aiming for 190 degrees. My oven thermometer revealed that it was difficult to get this temperature. The oven tended to hover at 180 degrees... And then if I turned it up to 200, it would sometimes go up to 210.
The initial demolding looked promising. The rear of the bird had a big air bubble -- but was otherwise pleasantly springy to the touch.
The nose, however, was another matter. Not only did it have a huge air bubble in it -- when I demolded it, it collapsed like a bad soufflé.
I should have let this mold bake for at least 6 hours... And maybe more. Not only is this a rather puffy character -- the mold is also ridiculously huge. I think the stone must have been doing a lot to insulate the nose from the oven's heat.
The entire thing has shrunk a little bit... But the rear end has maintained a consistency that I believe is what cured foam latex should feel like. So: progress.
This morning I washed the foam in soapy water, as you're supposed to do. It was pretty neat to watch the foam suck up water.
After squeezing out the water, there are wrinkles in the foam that I don't think are going to come out. I know that it's the nature of foam to wrinkle... Still, this doesn't make me love the material more!
I'm slowly getting the feel for this stuff... But I'd rather be using a material that involves less guesswork and witchcraft in its preparation.
I'm reminded of the silicone vs. foam latex comparison I did last May. Back then I concluded that I'd probably wind up using silicone as my primary casting medium. Now that I've had a little experience foam, silicone is seeming pretty appealing once again.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (13) | categories: stopmo
April 10, 2007
guest animator: hazel malone
by sven at 8:00 am
Hazel Malone is an aspiring animator here in Portland. To help her pursue the art, we've been scheduling time and setting her up with my animation equipment in the studio. Here are the test clips that she's made so far...
This quickie was what she did on the first day she came over (Feb 8). That's the Diplomat armature she used.
This second clip was done on Feb 12, again with the Diplomat. Personally, I see the influence of the Brothers Quay in the vibrating, flapping arms.
The third clip was done on Mar 29, this time with the Man of Steel armature. She described its action as "cowering in fear."
This clip also includes footage of Hazel's first puppet...
I'm very pleased that she found the demo wire armature tutorial I wrote helpful in constructing this. We've had a number of long phone calls, talking about the minutia of puppet fab and where to purchase materials locally.
The fourth clip was done on Apr 6, entirely with Hazel's puppet. I'm really charmed by the pup walking off the edge of the animation table.
We're going to have to see about getting these uploaded to the new Puppet Training gallery over at StopMoShorts. (nudge!)
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: stopmo
April 9, 2007
improving the next armature
by sven at 8:00 am
Here is the master list of things to improve on my next armature project.
A. GENERAL
- The biggest problem with the Drifter is that all of the joints have drift. Solving this problem has to be top priority.
- Avoid the lathe, drill press, and grinder. Try doing all their operations on the mill. My current belief is that the mill will be able to give better results on all accounts.
B. DESIGN
1. Joints
- drift must be eliminated
- there should be more space between sandwich plates than just the diameter of the rod
- leave more of a lip between a socket and the edge of the plate
2. Shoulders
- Double-jointed shoulders kink up. Step-block joints are the minimum requirement for adequate shoulders. Hinge and swivel joints would be even better.
3. Feet
- a foot bends at the toe, not in the middle
- the toe needs enough surface area beneath it to be able to grip the table when it’s tied down
- the sole should not be so long as to scrape the floor when the foot bends
- soles should be at least as wide as the ankle joint
- soles should be 1/16” thick, not 1/8”
4. Things To Add
- hands
- rigging point for jumps
- ”rectal tie-down” for sitting
C. PROCESS
1. Set-Ups
- make T-spacer that’s narrower than the sandwich plates
2. Ball Holes
- make attachable milling vise jaws to correct for loose jaw tilt error when locating ball center
- use “drill chuck tool holder” attachments to allow precise, uniform depth of holes
- only use center drill to “center punch” a mark -- not to drill any deeper
- use end mill to get a flat bottom inside the hole
- countersink the top rim of the hole
3. Sockets For Balls
- find way to eliminate plunge chatter
- drill holes at bottom of sockets to eliminate drift?
4. Radiusing
- use corner-radiusing end mill (to avoid grinder dust and plier marks)
5. Through-Holes
- make a slotted riser to hold work pieces up while being drilled
6. Threaded Holes
- try using the drill chuck method for tapping
- countersink rim of hole
7. Brazing
- use hard silver solder instead of SafetySilv 56
- leave parts in pickle longer
8. Maybe...?
- does the stock need to be squared?
- counterbore holes for screw heads?
- use a vibro-tumbler to remove firescale?
- do joint trimming with an end mill and an angle table?
posted by sven | permalink | comments (6) | categories: stopmo
April 8, 2007
brazing and shining "the drifter"
by sven at 8:00 am
My brazing and shining skills have improved a great deal. The finished Drifter armature has really solid joins, and is really reflective when you throw a light on it. In this post I'll walk through the techniques I used on this latest project.
Here are all the segments of rod that I used for this project, in ten labeled bowls. They're actually bowls for dipping sauce, which I picked up at Pittman Restaurant Supply. ...A lot of time was saved, being able to confidently reach for whichever piece of metal I needed next.
I prep the ends of all the rod segments by sanding them with a bit of fine-grit sandpaper. The purpose of this is to make sure that the rod is clean before brazing -- and to help make sure that the rod will fit inside of the ball hole.
I'm using SafteySilv 56 to do my silver soldering. I use a fine-tip Sharpie marker to mark off 1/16" increments on the wire. I find it works best for me to have bits of soldering wire that are all about the same size. Instead of just eyeballing how much wire I need, I can keep notes and figure out how many bits particular joins require.
When I cut these little bits of SafteySilv, they want to go flying through the air. To avoid this, I keep my pliers flat against the table as I'm cutting. The little bits are trapped neatly underneath.
Once I've got a nice supply of silver solder bits, I put them into a plastic cup with a lid.
The lid's important. It's likely that there will be left-overs after I'm done brazing. I'll want to keep them for later... And at some point, it's innevitable that the cup is going to get tipped over. If there's no lid, the solder bits will definitely get lost.
I'm using Stay-Silv flux. It tends to dry out. I've got a new trick to deal with that.
I use my pliers to cut a toothpick in half. I dip the broken end of the toothpick in water, and spread it over the surface that I'm going to braze. Then, I use the toothpick to pick up some flux, and I mix it into the moisture. This works particularly well when you're trying to get flux into tiny ball holes.
For brazing 1/4" dia. balls onto 1/8" dia. rod, I've found that one 1/16" piece of silver solder is the right amount. It creates an unbreakable bond, and almost no solder comes out the seam.
[Note: For joins where the rod is connecting a flat area (e.g. the chest block) you want the solder to flow out of the hole. With the ball, overflow would impede motion; but that's not the case in flat areas. For these, I use 4-5 pieces of solder to get a visibly trustworthy bond.]
Tom Brierton, in Stop-Motion Armature Machining, demonstrates brazing with the rod on top of the ball. Lionel Ivan Orozco, in his brazing balls to rod tutorial, demonstrates brazing with the ball on top of the rod. Which is the better method?
I believe it's better to braze with the ball on top of the rod. This way if molten solder and flux come out of the ball hole, they'll mostly run down the rod -- rather than damaging the ball itself. Also, by using this position you can usually grip the rod in a vise -- which holds it in place much more reliably than a pair of pliers. (If you opt for this method, refer to LIO's tutorial for some important details.)
Before I light up my torch, I use a bit of toilet paper to wipe off the ball -- hopefully removing any stray drops of flux. Stray flux discolors the metal when heated... And you can't always see the clear fluid on the ball's surface.
I used a "little torch" to do the brazing. I used an oxygen-propane mix and a #7 tip.
Halfway through the job, I ran out of oxygen. Lesson learned: keep spare canisters of oxygen and propane on hand. I've been surprised at the variance in price. Oxygen costs (if I remember correctly) about $16.50 at Simon Golub & Sons -- But less than $9 at Ace hardware. I'll be keeping my eyes out now, looking for the best price.
Using a big flame on the balls, they heat up quickly and don't develop much firescale (blackening). To clean them up, I use a bit of medium-grade ScotchBrite pad.
Initially when I heard about ScotchBrite pads, I thought it was the same stuff that you use to wash dishes. Well, it's the same makers -- but a completely different product. This stuff you find at a good hardware store. In Portland, I get it at W.C. Winks. It doesn't seem to be available at Ace (which is located much closer to me).
Here's a handy trick I came up with... You can put a ball-rod assembly into the chuck of a hand-held power drill to speed up the cleaning process.
When I braze the armature's chest and pelvis, the firescale problem is much worse. Because there's more metal to heat up, I have to hold the flame on it much longer. If there's a way to avoid blackening my parts like this, I'd be very grateful to learn it!
I now look at pickling as being mostly about dissolving leftover flux... But it does help loosen and get rid of some of the firescale too. It may be that if I left the parts in the pickle for a longer period, I'd get better results. I'm unclear at this point how long parts ought to sit in the liquid.
I'm using Sparex #1, which is specifically for steel. There's a note on the label that it doesn't work on stainless steel unless you run an electrical current through the mix... Something that I don't see myself attempting anytime soon!
Here are the parts after being pickled. Better -- but not great. The rest of the shining I did with ScotchBrite. (I also used fine-grit sandpaper on the large flat areas.)
difficult bits: the chest, pelvis, and feet
Constructing the chest and pelvis blocks is rather challenging. Figuring out how best to hold the parts, and in what order parts should get brazed together -- it takes some thought. The following photos show a series of set-ups that worked out pretty well for me.
For me, the feet are usually the most challenging part of the armature to construct. I'm not entirely happy with this armature's feet, but let's take a closer look at them.
Problems with the feet:
- I made the sole of the foot too long -- it actually cuts into the ground when the armature goes up on its toes
- the joint in the foot should be closer to the toe, not right in the middle
- the sole of the foot isn't wide enough to feel really stable
- the sole of the foot is overly thick
- the toe barely has enough surface area to grab onto the floor when its tie-down is tightened
For the feet, I had to braze flat surfaces to flat surfaces. I find this more difficult that brazing balls onto rods -- where the silver solder is neatly tucked inside of the hole, and the rod holds it in place.
I used roll pins (AKA "tension pins") to create a mechanical bond between the parts that I wanted to braze. This makes the join stronger -- and holds things in place while you're applying the flame.
These are 1/4" long, 1/16" dia. roll pins that I got at Ace hardware. In order to make an appropriately sized hole for them, you need a #52 jobber. (Figuring out what size drill bit I needed, and then going out to buy it -- that ate up a work day.)
When you're brazing, the solder wants to travel toward the source of heat. That means that you can't just shoot fire at it -- you have to figure out where to place the flame so that the solder will flow where you want it to go.
For brazing the toe -- which you see above -- I laid wire on the side of the toe (which was pointed upward) and applied heat to the front. This worked adequately well, but not great.
For the sole of the foot, I milled away a little metal on both ends so the balls of the joint couldn't accidentally rub. (I could also have just used a file -- but I was feeling fussy.)
I really needed the roll pins to hold the parts together for this set-up. In the photo above, the smaller holes are for the pins.
Heating up the ankle joint created firescale in the sockets, which is difficult to ScotchBrite out. One more reason why I'd like to learn how to better avoid firescale in the first place!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (0) | categories: stopmo
April 7, 2007
stopmo and storytelling skills
by sven at 11:59 pm
Last night I was thinking about making a new animatic for Let Sleeping Gods Lie. I sat down at the keyboard to capture some of that inspiration -- and the following "essay" (?) tumbled out.
(The tone of it sort of makes me feel like I'm standing on a stage, delivering a commencement speech to myself.)
...
STOPMO & STORYTELLING
A puppet is just a special effect.
Its sole purpose is to look good in front of a camera. It doesn't matter how well or poorly constructed it is. Anything that looks good, is good.
The goal is to make stories come to life on screen. Or if not "stories," then at least moving art that can be projected in a movie theater or on a TV.
There is a strong temptation to simply make exquisite dolls -- and dollhouse worlds for them to live in.
There's a strong desire to build perfect miniature versions of your characters, which you'll then -- someday -- breath life into.
It's not an entirely bad impulse... In order to make it through the telling of your story, you want puppets that are sturdy, and puppets that don't fight back when you try to pose them.
But let your imagination and excitement be for the storytelling.
If you work at the craft of making well-built puppets, then that is what you will become good at.
If you work at the craft of telling stories, then you will produce animations that look god-awful -- but you will produce a lot of them.
When your excitement is for making up stories, making up scenes, imagining powerful images -- then you can take that energy and do something that people will find worth watching -- in just an afternoon. It'll lack production values... But that's not the point.
My point is that creating stories is a skill. It is a skill that you can practice and develop.
It's not the same thing as just writing a script. (That's a skill, too.) What I'm thinking of is coming up with a story of some sort, and then getting it on screen -- no matter how rough the production values are.
If that's your passion... Then other skills will still develop (perhaps not as quickly as if they're your focus) -- and they will be appropriately subordinate to the greater cause.
Imagine that you have a collection of sketchbooks. One sketchbook contains the series of armatures that you've made while developing your skills as an armature-maker. One sketchbook contains the series of maquettes that you've made while developing your skills (and style) as a sculptor. And in another sketchbook, are the stories that you've made films of.
You can't learn how to be a painter very well if you spend the first four years of your career making just one painting. You need to make as many paintings as possible -- knowing that your early works won't satisfy you -- but that they are the first links in a long chain that eventually leads to what you want.
So imagine a story, and then get it onto the screen as quickly as possible. In a day. Half a week at most. Use still photographs, or hand puppets, or cut-outs -- whatever you know how to use well enough so that you can get the idea out.
Because in the end, every aspect of film production is about IDEAS.
The story is an idea. Making a better armature -- it's about your ideas surrounding armature-making. Sculpting: if that's what you find yourself working on, then there are ideas there that you're pursuing, too... Or rather, ideas that are pulling you on.
Let go of what your hands are drawn to do... Just long enough to look at all the different kinds of things that you could make. That you could study... Story. Sculpting. Lighting. Armatures. Mold-making and casting. Puppet fab (build-up, painting, costumes). Script-writing.
[Again, making stories and writing out scripts -- they're two different things.]
Be "meta" enough to switch between areas of study. Try to consciously choose what it is that you're going to study next.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (0) | categories: let sleeping gods lie, stopmo, writing
sandwich plates for "the drifter"
by sven at 8:00 am
The sandwich plate joints on the Drifter don't work nearly as well as I'd like. I want to write out some notes about how I made them, while the process is still fresh in my mind...
Hopefully the notes will be of some use when I get around to making my next armature project.
A. CUT-OFF SAW
The first job was to rough cut my stock. I used 1/8"x1/4" 1018 steel bar for the sandwich plates.
Now that I've got an abrasive wheel on the mini cut-off saw, it works great! For estimation purposes, it's good to assume that a cut is 1/16" wide... So, when I'm doing a bunch of cuts off of one strip, I tend to allow for 1/8" between the pieces I want -- which should leave a safe margin of 1/32" extra on either side of the cut.
B. MILLING
Next stop: the milling machine.
My general approach to making the sandwich plates this time around: use a T-spacer as often as possible. The job of the T-spacer is to give me identical registration each time I put a workpiece into the milling vise. All in all, the approach seemed sound.
After I've rough-cut a piece of steel, I need to face one side of it on the mill. One side has to be perfectly square -- or else the T-spacer won't do me any good.
(Note that the T-spacer in the photo above isn't being used for registration, but rather to balance out pressure on both sides of the vise.)
After I facing a plate, I'd mark the square side with a fine-point Sharpie -- just so I'd be clear which side was which.
The more I think about it, I think I could have done a better job constructing the T-spacer. I measured and cut the two pieces of metal, and then screwed them together. I probably should have gone through those steps -- but left the nose long. Then, I could have milled it and been certain that the end was exactly the right length and perfectly square.
The other error I made with the T-spacer is that I made it .25" wide. I'm now thinking that I should have made it slightly narrower. After I got my plates registered, I had to gently tap on the T-spacer to get it out of the vise, and out of my way. Knocking the T-spacer out of the vise surely couldn't have helped my accuracy!
It doesn't matter exactly where in the vise the T-spacer puts the plate -- what's important is just that all the plates go into the vise in the same place.
After I've got my first plate locked in the vise, I use the wiggler to figure out where to drill the first socket. When I get the spindle over that spot, I get to leave it there for quite a while.
The way that I designed these plates, the center of the .25" dia. socket was .125" from the edge of the plate. In retrospect, i think I'd like to have planned for there to be a little bit more lip at the end of the plate. [Although, to an extent there was some lip, since the socket is shallow enough that it doesn't wind up having a full .25" diameter.]
I had serious trouble doing plunge cuts with the ball-nosed end mill.
I got terrible vibrations ("chatter?") which left striations in the socket. I think that problem was due to me trying to make the plunge too quickly. I had assumed that I needed to make the plunge quickly in order to avoid work hardening -- like I did with the drill in the lathe method of drilling balls.
Making a shallow cut -- then backing off and starting again -- seemed to help. I tried making the cut much more slowly, and that also generally seemed to help. Sometimes it felt like the cutter was pulling itself down into the steel without my help -- but I'm really not sure if I was just imagining that.
I'm confused about what the rpm should be for this cut. I chose my rpm based on the shaft of the cutter being .25" dia. -- about 500 rpm, if I recall correctly. But the tip of the cutter isn't that wide... How do you choose an appropriate speed when the cutter isn't just cylindrical?
Drilling sockets is a pretty crucial skill. Based on some trial attempts a few months ago, I didn't think I was going to have any problems. Now I see that I ought to do some more practice cuts to figure this out, before I get into my next serious project.
Here's another principle that was guiding my process on this project: move the spindle as infrequently as possible.
I milled all the right-most sockets in all of the plates. Then I moved the spindle over and did all the cups in its next position. [I'm speaking inaccurately; the spindle doesn't actually move -- only the XY table moves.]
Operations on the drill press are almost always more "quick and dirty" than operations on the mill. I decided that because the holes for screws are designed to have some play in them, I ought to try making those holes on the drill press instead of on the mill.
In preparation, though, I used the #2 center drill to mark where the holes would go.
C. DRILL PRESS
That concludes the work on the mill. On to the drill press.
I have a small MicroLux drill press that I got from Micro-Mark a while back. I've been so enamored with the precision of my mill, I've hardly used it...
Still, I figure I ought to be learning to use "the best tool for the job" -- and oftentimes speed is more a more important factor than accuracy. I keep trying to remind myself: Be accurate -- but don't use more accuracy than the task requires.
For this job, I made two risers -- so I could drill a hole in a work piece and not be cutting into the riser that's holding it up.
The more I think about it, I think it would probably be better to just make a single riser with a slot in the middle. Having two risers actually wound up being kind of fiddly.
Drilling the holes using the drill press went just fine. I used a #43 jobber for the threaded holes, and a 1/8" drill bit for the through-holes.
Technically, you ought to clamp down the vise, and not hold it with your hand. At one point I got a lesson in why this is the case: My hand slipped, and the drill press picked up the vise and threw it off the table. ...Thank goodness I've chosen to work with small machines!
I gotta say, though, this experience does tempt me to shelve the drill press and just work on the mill. If I stop drilling balls on the lathe, then I could wind up doing pretty much everything on the mill -- which feels sort of elegant... I could clear some table space...
I've been thinking about using the method of tapping holes where you put the tap loosely into the chuck that just drilled the starter hole. ...That would potentially be another reason to not stick with the drill press -- it's easier to get the drill chuck exactly where I want it when I use the mill.
D. BENCH VISE WORK
The next job is to "tap" (put threads into) the screw holes.
It usually makes sense to do all the operations of one kind on your work pieces, and then move on to the next step. ...Technically, I could have tapped each plate immediately after after drilling it -- while it was still in the milling vise. But I found it easier to just get all the drilling done, and then move over to the bench vise.
I love it when I've got just the right tool for the right job... Tweezers really came in handy when I needed to put sandwich plates into the bench vise. It's a little thing -- but so much easier than when I was trying to get the pieces placed using a flat needle file or a set of pliers.
Sometimes my tap hasn't been completely perpendicular to the work piece. I recently read about making a "tapping block" to help guide the tap -- so I decided to try making a quick and dirty one for myself.
It's just a 1/8" hole drilled through a scrap of aluminum. It did seem to help a little when I was getting the tap started. Still, I know I can get my tapping technique better. This is an area for improvement.
[Note: I'm interested in trying out using a countersink for the edges of the threaded hole. Also for the rim of the ball holes.]
E. GRINDER
For the Drifter armature, I decided that I wanted to radius the ends of sandwich plates using the grinder. From what I've read, this is the quickest way to create rounded corners -- and it's usually plenty good enough.
This is a 6" grinder. The wheels that it takes have to be 3/4" (or narrower) in width. I think if I were doing it again, I might buy an 8" wheel so I could use 1" wide wheels -- which seem to be the most common kind.
I've got the course grinding stone that came with the machine on the right, and a ScotchBrite wheel that I special-ordered from Palm Abrasive on the left.
I roughed out a radius using the course grinding wheel, and then gave it a few smoothing passes on the ScotchBrite wheel. The ScotchBrite wheel developed a deep groove, which I'm not too happy about. The groove made work more difficult later on, when I needed to trim the joints.
The grinder makes a hellacious amount of steel dust! I'm not sure how far the dust spreads; I'm worried about it getting into electronics that I've got in the same room. I've just purchased a good shop vac, which I hope to jury-rig into a dust collection system. I'm also considering replacing the coarse stone with an extra-aggressive ScotchBrite wheel to cut down on sparks.
I don't like the grinder much. Even with hearing protection on, I noticed my ears ringing a little afterwards. The dust is bad. Using pliers to hold the pieces I was grinding would leave marks on the metal. And occasionally a sandwich plate would skitter across the grinder, scraping up the part's edge.
It may take longer, but I'm eager to try using a corner radiusing end mill on the next project. I may even try using a tilting table and an end mill to trim the joints, rather than the ScotchBrite wheel. Slower, less "artful" -- but hopefully more uniform, functional and professional-looking.
F. FINISHING TOUCHES
After all the machining is done, I give each of the sandwich plates some individual attention.
For plates with threaded holes, here's the order of tasks I used:
- diamond file the edges of the threaded hole
- use fine sand paper to shine up all sides (except the one with the sockets)
- use a ScotchBrite pad on the socket side of the plate
- use a tap to clear any residual grime out of the threaded hole
- clean dust out of the sockets with a Q-tip
(Several of those steps aren't necessary for the through-hole plates.)
...
Done!
Well, except for trimming. And it's best to do that after you've done a test assembly of the armature -- after brazing. You want to see how all the joints are working out before you start making special modifications.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (0) | categories: stopmo
April 6, 2007
drilling balls: two methods (part 2 of 2)
by sven at 8:00 am
I'm walking through two methods for drilling balls. In yesterday's installment I discussed the lathe. Today I'll be discussing the mill.
METHOD #2: THE MILL
Drilling balls using the milling machine method requires some preparation and more set up time than the lathe method. However, it has several distinct advantages:
- If you have the right attachments, you can determine hole depth precisely.
- Because the ball sits on a hard surface, the drill cannot push it backwards.
- A milling vise is unlikely to mark the ball.
- The hole that you make holds cutting lubricant just where you need it -- which lessens concerns about work-hardening.
- Once a hole has been drilled in the ball, it may be possible to mill the bottom of that hole flat. (I haven't tried this idea out yet.)
- After you're set up for this job, it's faster to drill balls on the mill than on the lathe. (Approx 4 min. per ball versus 6.)
The main disadvantage is that it's more difficult to get the ball perfectly centered beneath your drill. If you're not very careful, it's easy to put a hole into the ball off-center.
A. PREPARATION
Before you can go through the process of drilling a ball on the mill, you need to first do two things:
- create a riser that will hold a ball at the right height in the milling vise
- get the mill's spindle dead center over the ball you want to drill
The milling vise has a groove vertical groove in the center of its fixed jaw that is intended to hold round stock in place. This groove is perfectly suited to holding a ball -- except that you also need to hold the ball up at the top of the vise jaws, so the drill bits can reach it.
I made this riser out of a bit of aluminum. Since the balls I'm drilling are .25" wide, I made it slightly narrower -- so it won't interfere with the vise jaws. (I've forgotten exactly how tall I needed to make it so that the ball is right at the top of the vise. Sorry.)
As for getting the mill's spindle dead center over the ball, we're going to need to use a simple (but astonishing) device called the "wiggler."
What is it? It's a needle that has a ball on one end; the ball is held loosely inside of a collet. At the other end of the needle, there's a small cylinder on its tip.
Using a wiggler is not at all difficult... But it's hard to understand how one of these things works if you've never seen it in action. I couldn't figure out the nature of the beast until I watched the SwarfRat video, Mini Machines 101 Volume 2 (Mill Series): Edgefinding & Location. ...Hopefully the photos here will help explain.
The plan is that we're going to figure out exactly where the edges of the milling vise are, and measure to the center of the ball from there.
Let's start with the X-axis. Attach the wiggler to the mill's spindle. Have the cylinder-tipped needle hanging down more or less vertically.
Turn on the mill to a high speed; say, 1000-2000 rpm. As the wiggler spins, you'll see that it's not hanging down perfectly vertical. That's OK...
Move the XY table along the X-axis until it just starts to come into contact with the tip of the wiggler. (Don't worry, the wiggler won't hurt the vise!)
Slowly, keep moving the vise toward the wiggler. As you do so, it will push the wiggler increasingly into alignment, until it's spinning almost perfectly vertically.
When the wiggler's needle seems vertical, start paying close attention to your digital read out (or handwheel markings, if you don't have a DRO). Move the XY table .0005" at a time...
Suddenly the needle will spin off, and spin wildly around! ...That's what it's supposed to do!
Turn off the mill's motor. You now know that .0005" ago you had the needle spinning "true". Back the XY table up a ways (to compensate for backlash), and then bring it forward again to where it was just before the needle spun off.
That little cylinder at the tip of the wiggler is .1" wide. In order to get the mill's spindle directly over the edge of the vise, therefore, we need to move it over .05" more -- to where the center of the wiggler would be.
Zero out your digital read out. You now know precisely where the edge of your vise is -- you can make all your future measurements from that point.
Next, we need to find an edge to measure from on the Y-axis. Which jaw should we use?
Well, the fixed jaw has the groove in it. The ball sits slightly inside of the groove, which means you won't be able to measure from there without doing some fairly complicated math.
The loose jaw is flat. If you find that edge, all you'll have to do is measure over one-half the diameter of the ball, and you'll be centered on the Y-axis. This is what I wound up doing, and I got very usable balls.
However, I did make an error here.
The loose jaw is nearly, but not perfectly vertical. Unlike a normal vise, which simply squeezes its jaws together, a milling vise pulls its loose jaw down at a 45 degree angle. It applies the greatest pressure at the center of the top lip of the loose jaw... What this means is that the loose jaw is going to be very slightly (almost unnoticably) tilted.
I got "good enough" results even so... But to get this method perfected, I'm going to need to machine some "soft jaws" which screw onto the milling vise's regular jaws. What we need is for the groove to be in the loose jaw, and for the fixed jaw to be perfectly flat and perfectly vertical.
Once you've found the edges of the milling vise and zeroed out the DRO, putting the spindle into position is a simple matter.
The Sherline milling vise is 1.95" wide. The groove in the milling vise that holds the ball -- it's exactly halfway across the vise's fixed jaw. So, on the X-axis, we want to move halfway across the jaw -- to .975".
The ball we're drilling is .25" in diameter; so half of that is .125". That's where we want to be on the Y-axis.
Lock your X and Y axes in place. Your spindle is going to stay in this position for the entire process of drilling balls.
B. DRILLING A BALL
OK, on to the drilling itself...
Step 1: Put center drill in drill chuck. I'm using a #2 center drill. The drill chuck pictured here is actually the same chuck that I used with the lathe method -- but I've unscrewed the morse arbor, and have attached a drill chuck tool holder in its place.
The drill chuck tool holder is a wonderful little attachment. Normally you'd use a drawbolt to pull the drill chuck's arbor into the mill's spindle. With this attachment, you can just screw it on like a end mill holder, using tommy bars. Much faster and easier! (And with all the repetitive steps in this process, you want all the "fast and easy" you can muster.)
I'm looking forward to getting set up with two drill chucks, both in tool holders, so I don't have to switch the center drill and 1/8" drill bit in and out. I want all my tool changes to be done with just a pair of tommy bars.
Step 2: Touch the center drill to the ball. Zero out the digital read out on the Z-axis. Raise the spindle back up and away from the ball.
It's important to find the top edge of the ball now. In a moment we're going to file it away; after doing so, it's no longer possible to figure out the precise position of our drill bit's tip.
Step 3: File the ball. Use a bastard saw to make a small flat area on its top. Approx. 1/16" dia. should suffice.
Step 4: Add a drop of oil. Just on top of the ball, to help keep the metal from getting hot and work-hardening as we cut.
Step 5: Make a divot with the center drill. Put the center drill on a very high speed, say about 2000 rpm, and bring it down so it just kisses the ball. Don't go for any depth. Now, pull the drill back.
The next two steps are probably an error. As I now understand it, you shouldn't use the center drill to cut all the way down to its countersinking edge. Skip to step 8.
Step 6: Add more oil. The little divot you just made will hold it very nicely.
Step 7: Center drill deeper. Drill far enough down so that you get a hole with a beveled rim. This will help guide your 1/8" drill bit. It doesn't matter exactly how deep you make this cut, so long as you go to the same depth on all of the balls that you drill.
Step 8: Put 1/8" drill bit in chuck.
Step 9: Lower drill bit down to where it touches the ball. Zero out the digital read out. You're going to have to do some estimation to figure out how to compensate for the depth that you've already drilled using the center drill -- but so long as you've been consistent with that step, you should be able to drill holes with the 1/8" drill bit that are all nearly equal in depth.
However: If the center drill and the 1/8" drill bit were each in their own separate drill chuck and drill chuck tool holder, then there would be no variation of tool length -- and you could figure out precisely how deep you're drilling. That's what we really want.
Step 10: Add more oil. The hole that you've made so far will hold quite a lot, and make work-hardening almost a non-issue.
Step 11: Drill the ball. I used the same speed that I did with the lathe method: 1800 rpm. This seemed to work just fine -- but it's a decision that deserves review.
Step 12: Check that the hole is centered. Slip the ball onto the end of a piece of 1/8" dia rod, and spin the rod in your fingers. If it's not visibly off center, then you've produced a "good enough" ball. If two balls in a row check out OK, then you can eliminate this step -- your set-up is good, and will continue to produce good balls.
Congratulations! The ball is drilled. Now... Repeat.
At one point I wondered if I could skip a few steps and just do a plunge cut into the ball with a 1/8" dia. end mill... No good! The end mill put too much stress on the ball, and the side of the ball broke.
Well, it was worth a try!
CLEANING THE BALLS
Before the balls are ready to be brazed onto rods, there's one more process we need to go through: cleaning.
There's residual oil on the balls that needs to be removed. For a degreaser, I'm using Citrisolve. It's a household cleaner; the active ingredient is dilimonene. Dilimonene (as I understand it) comes from orange peel -- and you can smell it.
Dilimonene is one of the least toxic solvents you can use... But still, beware!
Even a "natural" solvent can harm you. I recommend wearing a respirator and working next to an open window.
After the solvent has broken up the leftover oil from machining, rinse off the balls with water a couple of times.
Lay out the balls to dry. As soon as the water has evaporated, they're ready for use.
...
Now you're done with the easy stuff, you can move on to making joints for the balls to sit in!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (3) | categories: stopmo
April 5, 2007
drilling balls: two methods (part 1 of 2)
by sven at 8:00 am
I'm going to walk through two methods for drilling balls. In this installment I'll discuss the lathe. In the next, I'll discuss the mill.
I took the photos in this tutorial while I was constructing my last armature (the "Drifter"). I made errors -- and I'll share those with you too, so you can learn with me. I don't claim that the methods I describe are "right" from a technical standpoint -- but they're what I know so far.
A helpful trick for working with balls, whether you're drilling them on the lathe or on the mill: use the magnet end of a metal scribe for picking them up and putting them where you want. I found this particularly helpful while trying to get balls into the lathe chuck.
METHOD #1: THE LATHE
Drilling balls on the lathe has one major advantage: the lathe will automatically center the hole for you.
However, drilling holes on the lathe also has several disadvantages.
- There's no way (that I know of) to drill a hole to a precise depth.
- Sometimes the drill seems to be pushing the ball deeper into the lathe chuck.
- I've had problems with the ball twisting in the chuck while I'm trying to drill it.
- Sometimes the lathe chuck marks the ball.
- Because the drill is sideways, oil tends to drip off of it.
I used the lathe method for drilling the balls of another armature (the "Man of Steel") six months ago. At the time, I felt that (with much experimentation) I had figured out how to get consistent results. On this most recent armature, I followed my notes from that previous project...
However, my results still weren't consistent. After an hour and a half of using this method, I had 9 successful balls and 6 failures -- a success rate that really seemed unacceptable. And then I broke my center drill. So I decided to try out an idea for drilling balls on the mill that I'd been considering.
The mill method took a fair while to set up... But I was able to drill balls faster and more consistently -- so I'm sold on the mill method now.
Still, I think I've figured out now what the main thing is that I was doing wrong on the lathe -- so I'm not going to say that the lathe method isn't worth pursuing.
OK, so here we go!
Step 1: Put a ball into the lathe chuck. As I said before, using the magnetic end of a metal scribe makes this much easier. If you're using your fingers or tweezers, the ball tends to roll back into the lathe chuck -- and it's very difficult to get out.
Step 2: Tighten the lathe chuck... I'm working on a Sherline lathe. I was having a hard time remembering which way tightened the chuck for a while. It turns out that the old mneumonic "righty tighty, lefty loosy" applies.
The lathe chuck is tightened using two rotating disks. Put a tommy bar in the disk that's closer to the motor and hold it still. Now put a second tommy bar in the disk that's facing you and turn it to the right (clockwise) to tighten.
Step 3: File the ball. Before you do any drilling on the ball, you need to file a little flat spot on it. About 1/16" wide will suffice.
To do this, I use a fairly large bastard file. Tom Brierton recommends doing the filing with the motor turned on and the lathe spinning. I haven't had good luck with that. Instead, I rub the file back and forth, and give the lathe chuck a few spins by hand -- just to make sure the flat spot I'm making isn't at too much of an angle.
Step 4: Put center drill in drill chuck. When a normal drill bit first touches the thing that it's going to cut, it has a tendency to wander off center -- which can cause the bit to break. A "center drill" has an extra-thick shank that prevents this from happening. You use it to just start a hole -- which you then expand with a normal drill bit.
I'm using a #2 center drill in a 1/4" drill chuck that fits into the lathe's ram using a #0 morse arbor.
Step 5: Put drill chuck in lathe's ram. The "morse arbor" is a tapered bit of rod that you simply press into the lathe's ram; it doesn't need to be screwed in, or locked in some other fashion.
Step 6: Touch the center drill to the ball. At this point, the ram should be sliding freely along the lathe bed. Slide the ram up close to the ball, until the center drill is just touching the ball.
Step 7: Lock the ram in place. Now that you have the ram where you want it, use a hex key to fix it there.
Step 8: Back up the center drill. Rotate the ram's handwheel one rotation in order to back the center drill away from the ball.
Step 9: Oil the center drill. Just drip a drop or so on the center drill's tip.
Here's a photo of the kind of oil that I'm using.
Step 10: Center drill the ball. I've found that to cut a type 302 stainless steel ball on my lathe, I should have it spinning at 1800 rpm. I arrived at that number by experimentation -- I haven't been able research my way to a "correct" answer yet.
It's incredibly important that you don't press the drill into the ball slowly. If you do so, then something called "work hardening" occurs (due to heat, I believe). The metal effectively becomes harder, and it becomes quite difficult to drill a hole at all. So when you press the drill into the ball, you need to do so quite quickly.
Here's where I think I made my main mistake:
As I now understand it, the center drill is really just that little tip. There's also a tapered cutting surface up at the shank. That bit, I believe, is for doing "counter-sinking": tapering the edge of a hole that you've already cut. See, the center drill that I'm using is actually dual-purpose.
I would press the center drill into the ball all the way up to the counter-sinking edge. I now believe that I should have only been making a little divot -- just enough to center the drill bit in the next stage of this process. I think that part of why the ball would sometimes twist on me is because as I tried to press a drill bit into the hole that I made, it would catch on the rim -- and the ball would deflect. A mere divot shouldn't cause deflection.
Step 11: Replace the center drill with a drill bit. Use the hex key to unlock the ram. Slide the ram back on the lathe bed, and then turn the handwheel backwards until the drill chuck pops out.
Since I'm working with a 1/4" dia. ball, I've chosen to use 1/8" dia. rod -- so I put a 1/8" drill bit in the chuck now. Put the chuck back into the ram.
Step 12: Touch the drill bit to the ball's hole. Slide the ram down the lathe bed until the drill bit just touches the starter hole (or divot) that the center drill made.
Step 13: Lock the ram in place. Now that we have the ram where we want it, once again use your hex key to fix it there.
Step 14: Back up the drill bit. Turn the ram's handwheel one rotation backwards so that the bit isn't touching the ball.
Step 15: Oil the drill bit.
Step 16: Drill the ball. Again, turn the lathe on to 1800 rpm. To avoid work-hardening, press the drill into the ball quickly. (It's counter-intuitive, but the drill cuts much easier when you go fast than if you try to carefully go slow!)
One rotation of the handwheel is .05". The ball is .25" in diameter. I want to drill a hole halfway through the ball: .125". So, that's two and a half rotations of the handwheel. But: don't forget that since we backed off the drill one handwheel rotation from the ball, we actually need to go three and a half rotations forward now.
I strongly recommend counting out loud. Once you've gone through this process ten times, it's easy to get hypnotized and lose track of how many times you've spun the handwheel.
And here's where I made another mistake:
Because I filed a flat spot on the ball, and then used the center drill to make a divot, it's impossible for me to know at this point exactly how far away from the center of the ball my drill bit is. I have to make a guess in order to compensate. If I'm careful about center drilling to an equal depth each time, I can at least ensure that the depth I drill to is fairly equal each time...
However, I've repeatedly forgotten to take into account that the tip of the drill is conical. Even if I can somehow drill to the exact center of the ball, we're measuring from the tip of the drill -- a rod which has been cut off straight cannot reach that point.
It's not a big error when you're only looking at one ball... But if you ignore that error, you can wind up with an armature that's a full half inch taller than your blueprint.
I did!
...
So, there you have it: sixteen steps. It seems kind of foolish to list all of them out like this. After all, if you have your own lathe, then you surely understand how to work it.... However, I want to give the uninitiated a taste of how one actually works this device.
Also, at least for myself, spelling out the steps in excruciating detail helps me get faster at doing them. The "Drifter" armature required 20 drilled balls -- and I made six extra, in case of accidents. I believe at my fastest I could get through those 16 steps in 6 minutes. That's more that two and a half hours just drilling balls -- if I'm at my peak.
With the mill method, I could get a ball done in just 4 minutes. ...More about that tomorrow!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (0) | categories: stopmo
April 4, 2007
new armature: the drifter
by sven at 9:00 pm
The "Drifter" is the fourth jointed armature that I've made in my own shop. Making it took 45 hours, over the course of 11 days.
It's made entirely of steel: 1018 for plates and rods, 302 for balls. The joints are all sandwich plate ball-and-socket. It stands 8 and 1/16" tall.
Why do I call it the "Drifter?" Well, because... Due to a mistake in how I engineered the ball sockets, every joint has a bad case of drift. Drat!
["Drift" is when a the ball is biased to follow a certain arc of motion, rather than moving smoothly in all directions.]
One of the first tests you do on an armature is putting it into an extreme lean. If your puppet can't lean forward without falling over, it can't walk or run. This armature passes the test. (The ankles have to be pretty tight, though.)
A notable feature of this armature is that it has jointed feet. Fussy to make -- but having a toe as well as an ankle allows you to animate walks much more realistically.
I'm not intending to put the Drifter inside a puppet. He's part of a series that I'm doing in order to teach myself the art of armature-making. I've already made a display stand for him. And I have plans outlined for my next two learning projects.
My past three armatures were meant to have human proportions. For this one, I had more of a "gnome" body in mind -- wider in the torso, and with long feet.
I had intended to give this design step-block hands... But when I discovered the drift problem, I decided to leave that for the next project. (Which I'm thinking will be constructed entirely from step-block joints -- no sandwich plates.)
Here's a comparison of the Drifter with my last home project, the Man of Steel...
- The Man of Steel used open-hole sandwich plates, rather than a true ball-and-socket design.
- The Man of Steel used 5/8" dia. balls, whereas the Drifter uses 1/4" dia. balls.
- Rods are perpendicular to the chest and pelvis blocks on the Drifter -- rather than being laid parallel on pieces of flat stock, as I did with the Man of Steel.
- The Drifter has double-jointed shoulders in order to allow greater range of motion.
- The Drifter is the first home project I've done with jointed feet.
I have qualms about the Drifter's performance. However, my design and machining skills have come a long way during the past six months. My accuracy and efficiency in constructing this armature were far superior to the last attempt. The brazing job is much more reliable, and I was able to get a much better shine on the metal...
All in all, excellent progress.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (7) | categories: stopmo
March 26, 2007
armature teaser
by sven at 11:59 pm
I just wanted to tease y'all a little... Saturday (3/25) I started work on a new armature.
The big picture:
- steel again
- actual ball-and-socket joints (rather than open-hole)
Design improvements:
- square stock at neck for better attachment of head
- body blocks perpendicular to incoming rods
- different shoulder design, to increase range of motion
- step-block wrist joints
- wire fingers
- ankles closer to soles of feet
- hinged toes
Changes in the construction process:
- drilling balls using mill (instead of lathe)
- brazing using oxy-propane "little torch"
- cleaning balls using Scotch-Brite pads
- doing rough-cuts using mini cut-off wheel
- on the mill, I've learned how to use a "wiggler" for locating edges
- using drill press for through-holes
- sandwich plates radiused using grinder (rather than a jig and rotary table)
- trimming the joints using Scotch-Brite wheel on grinder
- handy metal bowls to keep groups of parts together
More soon!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (6) | categories: stopmo
March 12, 2007
speaking @ the "world puppet animation" show
by sven at 3:30 pm
Yesterday I had my speaking engagement at the "World Puppet Animation" show. Thanks gl. for taking photos!
I felt it went pretty well. When I spoke, I felt like I knew just what I wanted to say -- and I didn't "um" much. After the films were over, the audience wanted to hear about my reactions to what we'd seen... I wasn't as sure-footed for that part, but see now how I could be better prepared to respond in the future.
There were 9 or 10 of us at the show. I suspect it being a Sunday -- and the Daylight Savings change -- probably kept numbers low.
There was a version of Puss and Boots by the Diehl brothers from Nazi-era Germany that was astonishing; the puppets and sets all looked like they were made by master doll-makers.
We saw a George Pal short -- featuring his unique replacement animation technique -- which I'd seen previously in The Puppetoon Movie. [If you're into stopmo, you must see this film!]
There was a Rankin & Bass-style film from Czechoslovakia titled "The Problem" which I absolutely adored -- and which I will probably never have the opportunity to see again. I'm very glad I went to this show -- even if I hadn't been speaking!
I didn't have any written notes for the speaking... But I did have a mental outline. Here's what I said, as best as I can reconstruct it.
[I. INTRODUCE MYSELF]
My name is Sven Bonnichsen. I'm a mixed media animator. That means I do two-dimensional drawn animation, computer animation, and stop-motion puppet animation. My focus is on puppet animation, and I specialize in making metal armatures -- the skeletons that go inside of puppets so they can hold a pose.
[II. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TYPES OF ANIMATION]
I want to start by saying a little about the differences between puppet animation, drawn animation, and computer animation.
When you're doing drawn animation, you start by making your "keyframes" -- the most important poses in a sequence. Then, you draw the "in-betweens" that get you from point A to point B. This is all on paper -- so as you work, you can flip through the pages to check that your animation is going how you want it to.
Not so with puppet animation. With puppet animation, you start with frame one, and just have to keep going forward. Once you start work on a sequence, you have to keep direction of momentum and arcs of motion all in your head -- so it's very important that you do NOT stop in the middle!
Computer animation, like drawn animation, makes use of in-betweens. You define point A and point B, and then let the computer figure out how to move your model from one point to the other.
Computer animation is very popular with big movie studios because you can have a whole team of animators working on one sequence. One person can be working on the motion of the arm, while another is working on the eyes -- and you can go back and edit what you've programmed endlessly.
Not so with puppet animation. With puppet animation, it's much more like a performance -- and the animator is like an actor. It's just one person going "mano a mano" with the puppet, getting into the puppet's head, breathing life into it.
One thing that I really appreciate about puppet animation, personally, is this tactile experience of being able to manipulate the puppet with your own hands.
Right now I'm working on a film titled "Let Sleeping Gods Lie" -- which, if all goes well, will appear in the H.P. Lovecraft Filmfest this October. In it, I've got these creatures with five legs. I'm trying to figure out how on earth a thing with five legs is supposed to walk...
In the film I've got both a CG model of the critter and a puppet version. When I'm working with the CG version, with the computer screen between me and it, I can't figure out for the life of me how it's supposed to move. But when I work with the puppet model, holding it in my hands I can begin to get a sense of things. "OK, as it leans this way, the weight of the thing has to transfer from this tentacle to this one..."
[III. PUPPET ANATOMY]
OK, so that's a little about the differences between different types of animation. Now I'd like to tell you a bit about the anatomy of a puppet, so you can better appreciate what you're going to be seeing tonight.
[III-A. TIE-DOWNS]
The most important thing to know about a puppet is that it has to be able to remain absolutely still between frames. When you're animating, you create the illusion of life by very carefully moving the puppet a little bit at a time. If the puppet twitches uncontrollably each time you snap a frame, then the illusion is destroyed.
So, one of the first things I always check on a puppet is if it can do an extreme lean. [I demonstrate Percy leaning forward.] Think about it: If you're taking a step, there's that moment before your foot touches down when you're leaning far forward... Can the puppet hold that pose without tipping over?
In order to keep the feet planted where they belong, you use "tie-downs." You drill holes in the floor of your set, and then these screws [I demonstrate] come up from underneath, and screw into little nuts in the feet of the puppet.
[III-B. ARMATURES]
In order to hold poses, the puppet needs to have a good armature inside of it.
There are three main types of armatures: ones that are made out of wood, or wire, or metal ball-and-socket joints.
Wood armatures were used a lot in early Eastern European puppetfilms -- but they're not used very much anymore, because the joints tend to wear down and lose their tension.
Wire armatures are the easiest type to make -- and are still used quite a bit in professional productions.
Metal ball-and-socket armatures are in many ways the best sort of armature, and get used extensively in feature-length projects.
Differences between wire armatures and ball-and-socket ones:
With wire armatures, you always have to be aware that the wire is ultimately going to break.
There are things that you can do make it less of a catastrophe when the armature does break. You can make your puppet with a detachable head and hands. That way when the wire breaks, the parts that you put the most work into -- which get the focus on screen -- can still be salvaged. [I demonstrate detaching Percy's hand.]
On a person, the elbow bends at one point. With a ball-and-socket armature, you can also have the elbow bend on a point -- which is nice. On a wire armature, though, if you bend the wire repeatedly on one point, it's going to break a lot quicker. So what you want to do is have slack at the elbow, so the wire bows gently, and the stress on the wire gets distributed.
Generally speaking, a ball-and-socket armature isn't going to break. But sometimes the joints do get loose -- and you're going to have to get inside the puppet to tighten them.
A ball-and-socket armature is sturdier and more precise than a wire armature. (With a wire armature, the wire springs back a little when you pose it.) But ball-and-socket armatures are also generally bigger -- and they're more expensive and labor-intensive to create.
So there are pros and cons to both.
[III-C. PUPPET COVERINGS]
Now, once you have your puppet armature, what are you going to cover it with?
There are three main options...
You could cover the armature with Plasticine and do claymation with it.
(A lot of people use the word "claymation" to mean anything that's stop-motion. "Claymation" is actually a trademarked term, coined by Will Vinton -- most famous for the California Raisins -- whose studio used to be right here in Portland. However, the word has gone into common usage... Sort of like how "Kleenex,