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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:

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:

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.

Mr. Grumpypants

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.

Mr. Grumpypants again

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:

  1. hand-drawn animation
  5. stopmo puppetfilms
  7. pop-thru animation
  9. 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.

Huh?

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:

  1. the framegrabber
  2. the ability to capture digital frames
  3. 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:

  1. previewing what a DSC/DV cam sees before you snap a frame
  2. triggering the DSC/DV cam, so we don't have to risk touching it
  3. storing the images captured
  4. 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.

my stopmo camera set-up
click on image to enlarge

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.

Canon ZR45 and Canon PowerShot G5

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.

demonstration of flicker
click on image to play clip (38 KB)

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.)

final film
click on image to play clip (2.1 MB)

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

behind the camera

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.

recording the voicetrack
click on image to play clip (1.9 MB)

"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.

Papagayo interface

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.

mouth stickers

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.

viseme chart

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.

mouth shapes in AfterEffects

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.

lipsync proof
click on image to play clip (885 KB)

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.

X-sheets

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.

non-linear pose development

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.

pop-thru
click on image to play clip (352 KB)

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.

stopwatch & metronome

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!)

tripod's kick-guard

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!

the finished film
click on image to play clip (2.1 MB)

Here's your reward for wading through this long post: The finished film!

the giant lightning sloth

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

fish puppet

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.


PART I: USING CG FOR MONSTER FILMS

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.


PART II: USING CG FOR CARTOON FILMS

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

click on image to play clip (2.1 MB)

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.

[Coraline]

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:

  1. Puppetry
  2. Cartoons
  3. Miniatures / Models / Dolls
  4. Assemblage / Found Objects
  5. Photo Realism
  6. Living Toys
  7. CG / Vinyl
  8. 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

[Trnka's "The Hand"]

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)

[Will Vinton's "Noid"]

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

[Nick Hilligoss' "Good Riddance"]

[Nick Hilligoss' "Good Riddance"]

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

[Jan Svankmajer's "Alice"]

[The Brothers Quay's "Street of Crocodiles"]

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

[Willis O'Brien's "King Kong"]

[Ray Harryhausen's Talos from "Jason and the Argonauts"]

[Phil Tippet's At-At Walkers from "The Empire Strikes Back"]

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

[Domokun]

[Adult Swim's "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

["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

[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

small hills

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).

insulation foam - rough forms

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.

carved foam

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.

gluing down fleece

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.]

PART I - Making Something to Sell

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 y