The puppets kept on breaking, 2 second clips could end up taking 6 hours to shoot, cameras were knocked, lights suddenly burst: all the fun unexpected caveats to stop motion animation. In spite of my newfound confidence, these few weeks of animating were truly filled with an amazing amount of stress and obstacles. The result is one of my smoothest shots below (filmed in front of a green screen, discussed in further detail below as well).
For most shots, I made a general plan and let the puppet and my accidents guide the motion. For more subtle animation, featured in the GIF below, Dragonframe allows me to create semi-unplanned actions and make them look natural. Dragonframe is certainly a godsend (I hate to provide free advertisement! but…). For example, with my newfound confidence I will gladly bend Lisa’s (my protagonist) toughly tempered elbow joint with full, thus moving her entire body a couple centimetres to the side, and then with reasonable ease adjust the position toggling in Dragonframe. The key is to do whatever you want to your puppet without fear and to use the wonders of modern image capture softwares (I used Dragonframe) to keep the animation smooth. So here is the key, that I’ve learned, to animating stop motion. Part of the reason I used to be such a timid stop motion animator was because I felt like I would have to move a body part so carefully so as not to move any of the rest of the body even a tiny bit. This might have saved them from breaking a lot of the time (for this film I have had a total of 7 armature breaks between two of the puppets!!), but it made the motion significantly more limited. In the past, and for past films, I’ve always been very gentle with my puppets. By this I don’t mean confidence in myself, but confidence in the puppet. Drawing from my experience at the Toronto Animated Image Society over the summer, with the great help of Toronto animator Evan DeRushie, I have learned to animate with more confidence. However, in those few weeks of animation my animating skills have really improved significantly. Since my last post, there have been tears and lots and lots of blood shed (mainly my puppet’s, only a bit of mine). Eeek! But now I’m finally done shooting, 5 weeks later! Here is a bit of a recap. And, once again, this is because I have been so preoccupied with production that I’ve neglected posting updates. Once again, it’s been a while since my last post.