Enzo’s Monday Motion #59: Stop Motion
It’s time for my all time favourite animation style: stop-motion! See how the pros from Aardman to The Box Troll’s LAIKA tackle the hurdles.
Rogue One
What’s so special about this Disney approved short is that it’s originally created by fans. Clearly not your average 45-year old neighbour who still plays with LEGO, but by the professionals Dan MacKenzie and Tucker Barrie who both worked on Charlie Kaufman’s Oscar-nominated Anomalisa.
Together with other pro fans on the creative community Tongal they produced this little gem using the official merchandising. And that’s where it all comes together: a free, well written, produced and uber commercial hit.
Disney instantly released an online competition for all fans. Anyone interested in joining me..? 😉
Inner Child
Nobody is too big for stop motion. Wes Anderson directed his feature film Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009. But not everyone knows that he has done similar smaller projects.
For the rebranding of Sony Ericsson to Sony Mobile, McCann builded a campaign around the concept “Made of Imagination”. Not only the products are designed imaginatively, also their users.
Anderson clearly was the man for this job. He teamed up with the other ‘pro’s of imagination’: kids! After interviewing 75 of them he picked one 8-year-olds idea and smartly used the real interview recording as a voice over, which makes it even more authentic.
Interesting canvas
When you’re fully in production, you pretty reach the point of no return. If you use a face as a canvas and hair for animation, there is literally no way back (unless you can sit still for a couple of weeks that is).
Wallace and Gromit’s Aardman production accepted the challenge of Braun shaving to present their products. In the end they used faces, heads and chests of over 50 men.
Next Level
Since stop motion is such a tedious job, it’s often shown in it’s characteristic sluggish frame rate of 12 fps — for the non geeks: it’s normal 24 of 25.
Another feature is often hardly no camera movement, since it quadruples the already hard production flow.
If there’s is one studio who disobeys all these tips and aims for a Pixar kinda smoothness and detail it’s LAIKA. Their power is that people totally forget the medium their watching and fully enjoy the story.
It’s not that they totally forget the digital power. They only see it as a tool to tell a story. For example: the main character of their latest project ‘Kubo and the Two Strings’ has over 48 million expressions which are 3D printed (but still hand painted).
The only variable they can’t beat (yet) is logically time. Their latest project took over 5 years. Good news: it’s in theatres right now! Watch the making of to get excited.
Solar City
We all know that fossil fuel is bad for the environment, but we don’t really know how tedious it also is to create it. To promote the healthy and simple competitor solar power, Arnold Worldwide came up with the concept of setting these two production techniques side by side. Together with Argentina-based Tronco and Brooklyn-based 1stAveMachine, the spots were directed by stop-motion masters Becho & Mab.
Like the previous projects, the preproduction part is created in 3D. Since this spot was created with paper folded characters, they turned to the simple yet very effective software called Papakura. In only 9 days they fully shot the set of three commercials, which is pretty impressive.
