Over the next few weeks on Stop.Frame, I’m going to look at the development of an animated short film in detail – from the character concept to the practicalities of props, puppet and set building, to the shoot and the editing and post-production. The film is Doctor Knowgood – the story of a self-important monkey [...]
I suggested recently that puppet animators should rush to their local supermarket to buy Christmas puddings for their rare brown cellophane wrapping. For, as we know, brown cellophane is key to producing realistic tea-pouring effects in stop-frame animation. But no! It turns out I was mistaken. There is another, simple way to create the same [...]
Anyone who has ever tried to animate a puppet pouring tea will probably have come across the advice to use brown cellophane as their material. I’m sure I’ve seen it in an Aardman book – probably Cracking Animation. But of course when I actually needed to animate a puppet pouring tea – for my short [...]
Anyone interested in working on a new puppet stopframe film should contact Michael Please as soon as possible. I posted recently about Michael’s nice short puppet film called Spectacular View. Apparently there’s a new film in the works. Michael is looking for people to help out with set, puppet and prop making on the much larger-scale The [...]
Here’s a nice, short stopframe animation using some of my favourite things: A nice, retro, Victorian-style design Flat, cut-out, 3D sets and puppets The film is by Michael Please. You can see it on his site here. Unfortunately it doesn’t let you see it at full-screen, or any bigger than the small frame size shown [...]
Here’s the craziness that happens when you mix a French artist with a group of Indonesian puppet makers. My former Bristol Animation Course colleague Anaïs Ruch has spent the past few months in scenic Yogakarta in Indonesia, battling with 40-degree heat and working with the Papermoon Puppet Theatre. This is the result: It’s a cool [...]
When you are trying to create puppet characters for your stop-frame animation, it’s all-too easy to just look at other people’s animation efforts for inspiration. But don’t! Look further afield and you can come up with rich sources of ideas to help you develop striking and original characters. (Well, original in that you haven’t lifted them [...]
I just received an email through Stop.Frame from someone starting up in animation who’d found the blog and wondered if I could share some thoughts on his first attempts at making a claymation/puppet film. James kindly says: I would like you to know how important blogs like yours are for people like my who are [...]
I’ve just found out from Google that everyone’s favourite claymation characters are 20 years old today (or thereabouts). Well, everyone apart from the ones who really, really like Morph. Altough that can’t be many – surely? But two decades? That’s the most frightening thing I’ve heard this week.
I’m a big fan of lip synch – that is animating a character’s mouth and expressions to match recorded dialogue. My favourite, oddly enough, is this animated advertisement for pest control from Germany. This is a Plasticine, or claymation, film – and for most people, lip synch brings to mind the time-consuming labour of love [...]
