Caleb Wood created this subtle and powerful hand painted animation for his degree project at RISD. It is reminiscent of the opening of Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon‘- but with a dog and cat. It really shows just how much can be communicated, using the most basic of materials, through hands-on artistry, great compositions and sound.
Der Konsument
Cumulus
Max Moertl shows us some whimsical ingenuity in these two shorts created in the Design Department at HAW Hamburg. Adding to their charm is the quirky and well crafted sound design. We look forward to more projects from Max. Below, he provides us with some insight into his process.
Max-
Der Konsument
The idea for the clay animation “Der Konsument” (The Consumer) crossed my mind at the supermarket. A place where the overload of products from which to choose leads to desperate and random purchases and special offers convince the dizzied customer to buy, buy, buy. I thought about this misguided consumption and explored whether the ‘special guest’ in my animation would be able to develop healthy consumer behaviors.
I started with conceiving of different meals, and then drew a minimalistic storyboard and then arranged the meals in a sensible order. After building the set and moulding the character out of clay I began animating. During the animation, I had a rough plot in my mind, but sometimes I spontaneously added or changed actions. The most challenging and time-consuming part was to animate the different phases of the mouth without using replacements.
In this project I was working with Dragon Stop Motion for the first time. Right from the start it is easy to control and I am impressed by the program’s helpful options. I used the toggle option to replace the eyes and to repair broken tentacles. With the drawing tool, I drew guides for flying objects.
Cumulus
The stop motion animation “Cumulus” was made for a group exhibition with the theme ‘water’. In my work I focused on the value and need for water and decided to let a small drop communicate these issues to the viewer. It was exciting for me to portray water in its different states. By having the ability of transforming between these states, the drop finds its own way through the story.
It was a challenge for me to animate water and to find suitable techniques to render each of the different states. After some tests with different liquids I decided to animate with real water. Equipped with a pipette I moved the water, drop by drop, each step further along. In some takes I used continuous shooting to capture the movement of the water. Animating with ice was a bit stressful due to the limitation on time caused by melting. A nylon thread which was frozen into the ice made it easier to control the movement and prevented the ice from slipping away. To make the steam touchable I used cotton for the clouds. It was important for me to create all effects on location without computer animation to achieve a tactile look – for example the lightning was done with light painting.
Dragon Stop Motion was very helpful during the animation and enabled me to work fast with precision on the project. An essential feature was the reverse playback which helped me to capture and view scenes in reverse order.
The Eagleman Stag – Trailer from Michael Please on Vimeo.
Michael Please has released a trailer for his new short film, The Eagleman Stag. Michael is a recent animation graduate from the Royal College of Art, where they use Dragon Stop Motion animation software. The trailer for The Eagleman Stag is beautiful and will leave you anticipating the full film.
We were excited to interview Michael about making the film.
How long did you work on it?
“It’s been a long time in the making! At 9 minutes it’s nearly twice the length of anything I’ve done before. The film has 115 separate shots, of which the vast majority have separate sets custom build specifically for each camera angle. So I had my work cut out. I spent 6 months on the actual build, shoot and post, but the film itself has been gestating as an idea for quite some time. The two months prior to shooting were spent adapting the short story I had written previously into a screenplay then fleshing out the film as much as possible in 2D. The 2D animatic is extremely close, almost shot for shot compared to the final film, so there was no room for chuff! When I showed this 2D animatic to a senior tutor at the RCA they described it as the most horrifically ambitious project they had seen in all their years of teaching. That made me very happy at the time. Later on, when I realized how right they were about the ‘horrific’ nature of it, I wasn’t quite so smug.”
What camera(s) did you use?
“The entire film was pretty much shot in camera, on my trusty Canon EOS 1000D. There are a lot fancier newfangled cameras out there, but for stopmotion, and the image size, it was all I needed. I did however go through about a week of faffing about with various setups, trying to work with manual lenses, and different cameras to rid myself of a mind-bendingly frustrating flicker issue that I couldn’t shake off. After some investigating I found that my automatic lens was the cause, as when the aperture opens up for live view it doesn’t close back to within 100% accuracy each time, which makes no difference for single photographs, but obviously with stopmotion it was a problem I had to resolve later on.”
How was Dragon Stop Motion helpful to you?
“Dragon was a wonderful tool and really helped the whole animation process. It’s such a fiddly, fisting the sky in frustration, pencil snapping process anyway, that anything to help tiny inanimate objects move bit by bit by bit a little more smoothly is warmly welcomed. It’s a complex program, but intuitively designed so that whenever I needed to do something new, I didn’t have to root through the help book, I could just naturally find my way. There are so many great details, being able to move reference footage around the screen, and shift the audio clip in the time line, and of course the whole cinematography window, I don’t know how I ever functioned without it! You can really tell its been designed by animators, because its those little things, the saving of annoyances, that are so helpful in alleviating the sometimes stressful process of animating.”
“Actually, one of my favorite things about the program is the Dragon Pad! This became indispensable on loads of shots as I physically needed to use both hands to hold things in view as I animated them. In the past I’ve either had to have someone else there or headbut/ spit objects at the Enter key in order to take the shot, but with the pad, it was just off with the socks and shoes and time to get toe capture happy.”
“So yes, thanks Dragon, you are a wonderful asset to the fine art of stopmotion!”
The final film is traveling the festival circuit at the moment. You can follow Michael on twitter.com/MisterPlease if you’d like to know where its screening next.
FILM TITLE: The Eagleman Stag
DIRECTOR: Michael Please
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Michael Please
ANIMATOR/S: Michael Please
CAPTURE SOFTWARE: Dragon Stop Motion
CAMERA SYSTEM: Canon EOS 1000D
COMPOSITING SOFTWARE: After Effects
SPECIAL TECHNIQUES: Lots of reverse stop-motion.
LESSONS LEARNED: Working with grass is worse than working with children and animals combined.
Kirsten Lepore
Filmmaker Kirsten Lepore has been wowing the film festival circuit over the last few years, expressing themes of romantic longing using an earthy, tactile approach. Kirsten discusses her move from illustration to stop-motion animation, the physicality of her process, and her youthful beginnings as a camcorder-auteur.
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