Wednesday 10 February 2016

Coraline Sets

Coraline is one of my favourite stop motion animations so I thought it would be a good idea to look into how it was created and the production process it went through. What I particularly like about this film is the aesthetics of the whole world and the atmosphere they create within the two parallel universes. Being able to create this effect is something that is vital in the storytelling so that the narrative is portrayed in the right way, so I also want to look into the ways they created both worlds. The largest set on the film is the orchard set and it came to being 60 feet long, which is due to the need for detail as well as space for the animators to move the puppets. What I also found interesting was that the sets include small trap doors, swing away walls and completely break away so that there is space to animate and they used around 150 different sets. I looked at what the sets are made out of for ideas that I could maybe use if I come to make my own at some point and I found that the trees in the orchard used painted popcorn as the leaves! I really like when average things you wouldn't think of can be used in sets and manipulated to fit the scene.

Monday 8 February 2016

Box Trolls - Using 3D printing for animation!

For the film Box Trolls there was a new step in stop motion animation as they were able to utilise the new technology of 3D printing in order to speed up the process. Feature-length stop motion films always feature the technique of replacement animation, where the faces and limbs are replaces over and over with different parts to create slight movement. The parts are pretty much the same but they a slightly different and traditionally stop motion animators would have to make every single part. Now there has been the uprise of 3D printing and for the film Box Trolls, the animators were able to push the printers to create the parts for them and print them ready for production. In this film there were up to 52,000 faces printed and needed for the final production and this was even with some characters being added in using CGI. I found that for the faces of the characters they split the faces into two parts, the top part of the face and the bottom and I found this really interesting as it would create lots of different emotions without having to always build a whole new face. I liked that this also allowed for just the change of the mouth if needed in the shot. For this film however, they could animate every part of the face much easier using 3D printing without the need to repaint every single face. The fact that technology like this is evolving and pushing animation forward really interests me and I only can imagine what else stop motion will be able to do using 3D printing.

Adventure Time - First Stop Motion Episode!

Adventure Time have recently released their first stop motion animation as a new episode called 'Bad Jubies' and I really enjoyed seeing the same characters but in a different medium. After looking at the behind the scenes of this episode it really interested me into how they make the characters move, in the clip below it shows the characters on cranes when they are jumping into the air. I liked being able to see  how they did this and it would be great to investigate further into how they edit out the crane, however I noticed that it's coloured green which may be how they select it out in post. What I also liked about this animation is that Jake as a character is a shape shifter which would be quite difficult to animate using stop motion, I did notice in this episode that he does not shape shift as much. This is clearly because it's hard to animate, however I would like to see more of adventure time episode being animated using stop motion and pushing there boundaries. Finally, I liked the way that the character of the storm was animated, this was a really nice use of a different material and the animators managed to pull it off really well using a cloud-like material instead of clay.