Art Books - Research
"The Stop Motion Filmography" by Neil Pettigrew
700+ pages of every single film up to 1999 featuring stop motion elements. Skimming through to find any mention of robots for more obscure references to look into of how robot characters are designed and animated in stop motion.
*batteries not included (1987) - pg 55 - little robots
The Black Hole (1979) - pg 84 - Disney, apparently not good though
Clash of the Titans (1981) - pg 126 - owl automaton?
Crash and Burn (1990) - pg 155 - follow up to robot jox, giant robots
The Empire Strikes Back (1980) - pg 211 - assuming there’s droids. Will ask Amy for scene recommendations. LOT of analysis in the book review
Metropolis (1926) - pg 447 - I’ve heard very good things about this film for the live action aspect
Naked Robot 4½ (1993) - pg 489 - rip off of robocop
Nemesis (1992) - pg 492 - rip off of terminator
Return of the Jedi (1983) - pg 574 - AT-AT and AT-STs (Scout Walkers)
RoboCop (1988) - pg 582 - ED-209 (animated by Phil Tippett, same guy that animated the mechanical creatures in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Worth looking at more of his work?)
RoboCop 2 (1990) - pg 587
RoboCop 3 (1993) - pg 595
Robot Jox (1989) - pg 596
Robot Wars (1993) - pg 601
Screamers (1996) - pg 606 - are they robots?
Starcrash (1979) - pg 661 - rip off of Star Wars but has harryhausen inspired robots
The Terminator (1984) - pg 677 - cyborg fight sequence
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) - pg 679
Vynález Zkázy (1958) - pg 747 - specially a sequence of cogs and pistons in a laboratory
The Art of Tim Burton’s “Nightmare Before Christmas”
Halloween town is all made up of jagged pointed shapes
Oogie Boogies original puppet was two feet tall, most of the other puppets are only half his height. Animators struggled with him cos he’s so huge and there’s so much foam that the armature needed to be very tight, so they were practically wresting the puppet. There’s one puppet used in normal lighting and a second bright green one for the ultraviolet light scenes
(Additional fun fact, the scene of him and bugs spilling out had to be cut because it was too difficult to animate, which is why there’s an extra verse in the soundtrack)
Script and storyboard go hand in hand. You go to board an action and realise it doesn’t work so you go back to rewrite the script. They didn’t have the full script when starting, only the songs - you don’t need the full script to begin boarding. Stop motion relies especially heavily on storyboards for how many puppets and sets are needed and how much takes place in a certain area (something I’ve been trying to consider from the start). No luxury of “fixing it in post”, everything has to be preplanned since you can’t shoot multiple versions of a scene, draw those versions instead
Art direction: even though the sets are three dimensional, they take advantage of very two dimensional design elements. The buildings and backgrounds of the world show influences from Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919)” to ancient cave drawings. Pushing things are gas as they can go. To force himself into drawing things in surprising ways, one artist drew with his wrong hand to make things look more off balance. Christmas Town is soft and sloppy, Dr Seuss and bright colours like candy. Halloween Town is German Expressionist, odd angles, on-edge, off-kilter; Halloween town looks like it would cut your hand if you ran it over it
The sets have to be strong enough to hang lights on and to suport the weight of the animators, who may have to crawl onto a set to move the puppets. Every set has to be rock solid, if it moves a shot could be lost. Even a relatively simple set requires a sturdy braced wooden framework. The horizontal surface is equally solid, made of high-density particleboard, so the characters can be screwed tightly into place. After the sets are built, the surfaces are textured with Styrofoam and various plaster mixes. Model mock-ups and detailed art department drawings guided set construction. The camera was five or six times the size of the characters so the set had to be built specifically to allow the camera to get into position. Trap doors hidden in sets for animator access (eg in the Halloween Town well)
For the doorknob forced perspective, they had to build a set to that view in the doorknob and then work backwards, two weeks of work
The props are made from a variety of materials, depending on how they will be used. Epoxy putty for some props. “Paper” is made from sandwiching aluminium foil between two very thin sheets of paper, it looks like paper but stays flexible and holds its shape
Armatures are usually made of aluminium and steel, sometimes augmented by wire or plastic. The earliest challenge is deciding how a character will move, figuring out what materials are best for the required actions. Also need to make sure the armature doesn’t “pop” in motions, must move smoothly between frames. The armature for Santa’s head has about fifty tiny parts that fit together to create eye, mouth and eyebrow movements. Before the full armature is assembled, the joints are tightened and the head’s fit is checked instead the foam face. Oogie took a day to assemble once the 175 parts were made (via machine) and weights six pounds. Jack however had plastic replacement heads because his armature is too thin. Jacks original designs by Tim Burton are half as thin as the final model; the team pushed the puppet until it became impossible to be thinner. Sally has over 120 replacement faces; ten types of face with eleven expressions. Hands and shoes and arms etc are kept on set if one breaks. A total of 227 puppets in the film, as they have to keep being remade.
Main requirement for an armature is that it can hold whatever pose the character is in without falling over or moving, and that the movement is smooth without popping. After detailed blueprints are drawn up the machine shop makes the joints and parts. The joints are silver-soldered and chrome-plated because the armature is covered with oxidising foam and baked in an oven, otherwise the armature would rust. The sculptor makes a clay model which is used to make a mold for the puppet, allowing for multiple to be made. The armature is placed in the mold and foam latex is injected. Some puppets are painted with a urethane-based paint that forms a flexible skin, others are treated with rubber cement and solvent mixture to temporarily open the surface of the foam so pigment can adhere. The stronger the paint job the better the puppet will hold up through a number of shots.
Fabricators have a large selection of cloth fabrics, natural and synthetic furs, fabric markers, and pigmented powders. Some clothes are also latex foam; Sally’s dress has to move with her and keep its pose. Santa’s beard is a wire foam core coated in fur. Wolfman fur had individual hairs punched into foam surface with a needle.
Before animating, some animators “rehearse” the movements, eg Oogie Boogie’s dance, to get a feel of the movements. Filmed in 24 fps. At the end of production there were nineteen staged and fourteen animators working simultaneously, but combined only got about seventy seconds of finished film per week. They’ve put as many as ten or eleven days into shooting a single shot, some up to twenty seconds long. Some camera movement was programmed digitally, some was practical. Animators do about four or five test shots on tens or twenties before shooting the “hero” (actual) take. Checking blocking, lighting and any potential problems before filming on ones. Jack was the easiest puppet to animate because he’s so thin
Considerations:
I can make set mock-up models
Make sure camera can access set/character
I could get away with 12 fps I reckon? Quicker to film
Try to keep shots short. Shooting long shots is risky; more to redo if there’s a mistake
Can I do camera movements digitally or practically? Depends on rig/tripod setup
Clothes have to move with character. I don’t have access to latex; would wire or aluminium sheet work between fabric layers? Eg for a long coat like I wanted
I don’t have budget for armatures like this
The Making of “Fantastic Mr. Fox”
Wes Anderson’s day starts with reviewing the previous day’s work, watching the dailies at night and sending feedback notes
The hill/landscape was sculpted by hand and then covered with dyed towels, tea leaves, and cut-up air conditioner filters to create the texture of leaves and grass
He loves stop motion like the old King Kong with the fur, which animators call “boiling” (presumably based on its movement). He loves the visual effects where you can see how it’s done, fascinating and mesmerising to him.
(Gorgeous art book. Mixture of original sketches, armature process, and fabrics annotations all on the same page)
Notes from Wes for the science lab: “the more dynamic the better for this set - we want lots and lots of props and science materials, we can’t to go overboard with this - also I think we want to darken the room and then light the different aspects - experiment light, aquarium light, light for poster, Bunsen burner - so they are working in a darkened room with special lighting”
Micro scale puppets too. Same characters in different scales
“We are currently in a drought of handmade-feeling things. They communicate some kind of life that other methods don’t necessarily communicate” - Eric Anderson, 2009
Wonderful book for behind the scenes visuals, doesn’t go into depth about any processes or materials though
Wes’s sketches are extremely simple. They don’t have to be super polished to get the idea across
Some miniature sets are just cutouts. In general the sets are pretty simple, especially exteriors. Science lab is small and simple construction but set dressing is very busy
Considerations:
Seems easy enough to replicate the grass textures. Towels and cut up fibres seem easy enough. I’ve seen people use cut up spongers for foliage texture too
Good to put a small cutout of characters for scale in mock-up environments (see the beech tree maquette - I LOVE the clay texturing!)
I think this is a good film for colour and lighting references and potentially visual style too; subconsciously my mind was imagining the exterior house shots in a Wes Anderson style with that same type of hill environment design (especially with the same location changing in each scene eg when the tractors come, I forgot about it but it’s pretty directly tied to what I had in mind). Rewatch and take notes. Perhaps worth doing some lighting studies. It seems Wes Anderson and Guillermo Del Toro are my main influences
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