Making of Stop Motion Animation

Busy, busy, busy

I was not able to write the follow up every day, while I was animating. Thats too bad. Well I was so busy with animating that I did not have energy for blogging. Reason for the busyness was that I was doing the shooting in Spain and we came back to Sweden to our home last friday. So I needed to finish all the shots in that particular setting and I managed. Now there is still dream sequence and the last scene of the animation to do. I will shot them here, I guess. However I will continue making posts to this blog, about the already done shots and news about the progress of a rest of the animation.

Also one old animation – Coffee Break – is going to finished probably quite soon and of course I will post also that here. It is something I did already two years ago. It was kind of exercise for making a nice setting. There is a story also, but the animation is quite short. But after losing almost hope for that animation in the end it is pretty nice.

Busy animator

Sixth day, a fine shot

First time during this animation I felt that I made very nice shot. That shot is a working shot where camera starts from the working woman and pans from her to the working man. I think everything worked very fine in that shot. Our male actor got new hands and now they look better and are better in practice also.

I think I have been mentioning few times moving camera. I obviously do not have any fancy machines to move camera. So I use my tripods middle bar which can be put to the horizontal position or desired position between vertical and horizontal position. So I put the bar almost horizontal position and then move the bar around the diameter. And of course I move it by hand, which is bit tricky and the movement can not be smooth as the real movement. In the other hand, this is animation!

Here the panning starts.

Fifth day a boring day

If the day before was routine the fifth day was quite boring. I did quite okay, but nothing very exciting. Though one shot where female character is hiding is quite nice, but I want keep that still secret. Then I did also some working shot and I decided that the hands of the man will be replaced with new ones without metal wires in the fingers.

A name tag

Fourth day, routine day

Well, I did four shots in a fourth day, it matches. Nothing very exciting or problematic. There was one slight problem. I made a shoot, showing how both main characters are working. It was suppose to go that way that in the end of the shoot there will be a working break and they stop working. However after showing sometime them working I got the arm problem again. This time the woman break both arms and she was not able to act anymore. What a diva. Actually she did act more in a next shot, but after some fine touch of the doctor. So I fix the arms with more wire. Which in her case is more difficult, because she has quite tight clothing and adding more wire under her cloth is rather tricky.

Other shots were quite short close ups. Maybe  the one she gets on her tiptoes. That I am not very happy. She is doing it too fast. Going down is okay, but going up not. Let see if I can fix it with some extra frames. The problem was that her legs are bit stiff it was very difficult to move them only little bit without messing her standing position or the set.

Working hard

Third day, good day

I did first working shot. I like to put my puppets to work. Simple work looks fantastic and can have interesting meanings. The working is very fast and simple. You will see. Then there was a shots with letters. Postman brought the letters to the table and one letter drops to the floor. Postman was again little bit a problem. I do not want to show the whole postman and then I was not sure how I am going to bring the letters to the table. In the end I made panning with the postman and it came good, maybe bit funny.

Letters were a bit pain in the ass, they are so small and light that putting them to the table was quite tricky . Dropping the letter from the table on the other hand was easy. Still I end up do it twice, because first time it was bit too fast and there was no finesse in the move. Little injury also happen, male character break his arm. Though that was expected I was very naive to think that the arm with only thin metal string will last. Next time I´ll get proper armature to work with, I am fed up metal string armatures.

Here is my set or one of them, the others do not exist yet.

Second day brought some problems

Second day did not went as well as the first animating day. The first shot went fine, but then the problems started. There is a shot where postman is pushing a mail cart. That was the problem. My idea to use spikes in the puppets feet and use cork floor in the set, did not work out so well when you move puppets. Though I must say that otherwise those spikes have been useful. Okay, walking was bit hard, like alway. But then the puppet was suppose to crap the cart handlers and that was surprisingly difficult because the fingers did have a metal wires inside and plasticine on that. So they were too stiff and because mail cart is quite light it start moving very easily when you try to animate the crabbing. In the end I made another hands with plasticine only and they work pretty okay even I did have to make them bigger.

Some mail to the cart

First day of animating

I was quite happy how the first day of animating went. Not any bigger problems. Well, battery charger did break and I have to buy a new one.  652 frames was the final result of the day. I am using twos so maybe 326 would be more fair number. Anyway more than 27 seconds of bootleg, not bad. I am using now first time live-feed helping the animation. Well before I was using cameras own software to remote control the camera. Which meant that I did have a live-feed but without possibility to use pictures to compare and use onion skining and such. Now I have Dragon Stopmotion and I am very happy with it.

Other main character with the letter

Luurankoperhonen started here

Summer 2006 - Starting point for the animation Luurankoperhonen.

After spending lot of time to setting the lights and the camera, this was the result for making first shootings. Pretty low-fi settings, but it did work quite fine. “Studio” was getting very hot during the shootings, outside 30-40 degrees celsius and inside I did not have any ventilation or even fan.

Here is the result:

Day one

This blog has been launched  to follow the process of making a current animation. Soon after I got the idea of this blog I decided to publish also a brief making of history of the earlier animations. So I guess in the end this blog will be also some sort of portfolio of my animations. Anyway the main purpose is still to describe the making process of current animations, show pictures, videos and tell about the problems and challenges of the process.

Juha Niemi

Here is my recent animation: