Friday, February 13, 2015
Stop Motion Animation Part 1: Create a Wire Armature Puppet
Stan Winston School of Character Arts: In PART 1 of their 4-part Stop Motion Animation webcourse series, the Chiodo Bros. (TEAM AMERICA, KILLER CLOWNS FROM OUTERSPACE, ELF) teach you to build a puppet perfect for frame-by-frame filmmaking. From design to final costumed creation, Stephen, Charlie & Ed share insights, techniques and tips that will help you create a posable character that is not only durable, but highly affordable.
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I've always found animation amazing ever since I saw chicken run! I've learned a lot about it recently because my brother wants to be a animator like Tim burton. I always love seeing how much time and detail is put into making a stop motion animation film. Seeing some of the process here again reminds me of the videos my brother had me watch. The intricacies of the sets and environments created is what really transport me into the world the artists create. I've watched my brother fail at making an armature many times using these techniques; they are not for the faint of heart. They are also not really made for a person that wants to do an arts and crafts project. The video supports that time is essential and that the way a process is done determines the final product. I love the way the artists are able to sculpt such a detailed character and to see a character and personality come from latex and wire. I also like the added effects of the paint and realistic details. I use some of the techniques for my design because of the style and techniques addressed that really add to the immersion of the story and the interaction of the characters on the environment
First of all, I think it's absolutely adorable that these three brothers work together on stop-motion animation. You have to wonder what got them all interested in the process at all. But anyways, onto the videos themselves, which are impressively interesting yet daunting at the same time. I was looking over the play-by-plays written for each of the segments in the six hour long video and was amazed with how much time could be spent on one part of the body. For example, it takes about forty minutes to construct and build the legs. If it takes them a half hour, then it's definitely going to take someone else who isn't as practiced at least a day! I think that's what you get sometimes with online tutorials, that what seems very easy is actually one of the most difficult processes in the universe. For a project I made an origami elephant, and in the video it took the person about 48 minutes to complete the paper folding. On the other side of the screen, it took me at least three hours to finish. I guess that's why we haven't completely switched to online tutoring from interactive teaching -- it's so much harder to get something without asking questions.
Animation of all kinds is my absolute favorite thing in the world. I especially am blown away by stop-motion animation because of the extreme dedication it takes to take those movies. If it took forty minutes to make legs, imagine how long it takes to make an entire movie. People who do stop-motion have the patience of a saint in order to make this type of art. The detail that also goes into this line of work is incredible. I loved to see how similar to a set, they started with a design and then made framing. Once the framing was complete, the aesthetic part was started. It’s always interesting to see how all art relates together in some way or another. Like Tom, I also really enjoyed the painting techniques which were shown. It’s amazing just how much can be done with paint and different brush techniques. Stop-motion is truly an amazing art form.
I’m a huge fan of all these stop motion animation articles that we are getting recently.
It’s really cool to see three brothers all working together on stop motion animation. It makes me wonder how they all decided to go into the same field and how they all (apparently) are equally good and making these incredibly detailed characters. It actually gives me hope that anyone can learn how to make a character and that it’s not something that you are just born with. You have to learn how to art to be good at it. I know my siblings and I could never do the same field of study because we just like different things, but if we had all decided on one career path, with enough time put in we could all be great at it. Same with art. It’s amazing.
Part of me really wishes that they had a longer preview video because I really want to know how they made this zombie. But then I was looking through the play by plays and it’s six hours long. This is not just a simple process that you can pick up in a couple of YouTube videos- it takes time. And a lot of it.
I just read the article on dark rides and I just find it so interesting to see different aspects of design being used in nontraditional ways. For example, the tiny costumes needed for the creation of the puppet. Or, simply, the overall design of the puppet. Stop motion animation, similar to dark rides, is a style of performance where everything that is designed has to be significantly more detailed than most theater sets or costumes. One of the reasons for this is that everything is in scale, so all the details that the audience is seeing with the assumption that it's actual size is actually significantly smaller. Because of this, the audience has higher expectations for the quality of the design which forces designers and fabricators to significantly raise the quality of their designs. Puppet creation is yet another aspect of design that is really interesting to me merely because it has so many different requirements when compared with a traditional theater set. This is yet another thing I want to design for.
I have always been so interested in stop motion animation. My great uncle actually
Created the characters that were used for some stop motion animation films. He spent a lot of time on the movie Coraline specifically and he would always show me what he was working on and how they worked. They are extremely fragile- which is something I learned early on. I feel as though this form of animation is over looked and under appreciated at times. There are so many steps and so much detail that goes into every single part of every single character. I would love to see more work or maybe even take part in this class to learn more about stop motion animation.
Stop motion animation has always stood out to me as the pinnacle of pinnacle filmmaking ever since I was a child. Growing up I watched Wallace and Grommet and Gumby, all of the time so when I realized that those features were created through vast multitudes of stop motion frames I was not only amazed but also gained such a respect for the art of stop motion. Personally I think of it as one of the hardest forms of filmmaking out there primarily because it is just such a long tedious process. Even though I’m not enthusiastic about stop motion like I was as a kid, I still have deep respect for it as an art form, there’s something unique about the more old fashioned process that makes it magical and superior to 3-D animation when done successfully like it was in the film. I think it is remarkable that these 3 brothers all work together in such a creatively demanding industry. Everything about stop motion; the detailed construction of the characters, the maintenance of the figures and scenery and the filming process is a pretty awe-inspiring feat that should be well respected.This is definitely an online course I'd like to watch, if only it was free.
Stop Motion completely blows my mind. It is an incredibly physical method of filmmaking that I absolutely adore, and the depth and complication of the process involved is something that I definitely would like to learn more about. As someone who lives in the details, the creation process of stop motion animation figures is so intriguing to me! I absolutely love working in small scale, and I can’t believe they can accomplish such detail in something that has to move as if it was alive. I only wish the videos didn’t require a subscription in order to watch! Do they use a special clay that allows for movement? How easily does the wire skeleton keep together? How would one create a stop-motion skeleton? (I know it’s possible, but how does that work?) I hope that someday my questions can be answered, as even in the previous articles dealing with stop motion animation they didn’t really answer the more specific production questions. I look forward to learning more in the future!
This is so cool. I (like everyone else) have always been fascinated by the way that things are animated. When I was a child I used to think that each individual frame was a picture drawn by the animator, since there had been a commercial on Nickelodeon on how to draw Spongebob in a certain scene. I really liked seeing the behind-the-scenes type stuff on the armature making, since it seems to me to be such a foreign concept. Here, they make it seem like something a little more tangible than the way I saw it when I was a child. I think this is one of the cooler uses of sculpture in creating movement and story, and I think it would be really cool if we were able to incorporate this into our curriculum.
Stop motion is such an incredible, wonderful, and almost unbelievable form of art! When I saw Coraline this past year, I was completely stunned by the animation of the movie. Her hair was made up of individual strands of wire, each of which was moved on its own accord throughout the movie to show the movement of her hair. The smoothness of the movements in the bodies of the characters was obvious proof that the animators treated this project with tremendous care and love. Another element of stop motion that I love is that everything is miniature, allowing for very creative use of materials. The trees in Coraline were made of red popcorn, creating a beautifully accurate image of trees with many bushy leaves, and who knew popcorn was so beautiful when it looks like it has been scaled up?
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