Stop motion wasn’t something I’d tried much prior to coming to CSM, and I wasn’t even really aware that it was an option on the course. However, after completing the module during the first year, I found the process very enjoyable and satisfying. Despite having a reputation for being a slow process, once you’re ready to shoot the results are obviously significantly quicker than producing line drawn work. It’s fun that you can play/interpret a scene with much greater ease than you can with other forms of animation, even if the puppet is limited by its construction and environment.
In some respects I regret not producing a stop motion piece for my final film (given how much I enjoyed the LIAF project), but producing anything on a larger scale would have required working in a team, and potentially costly additional equipment.
I’m not sure whether it’s a process that you would have to put in front of other animation work to find or produce work, and it feels like I would need to create other work/complete another stop motion specific course before standing a chance of working for a studio.
However, if working for myself, it does seem a very viable way to produce work quickly and relatively cheaply for internet ads/corporate type work which could also be quite unique. It also seems like a good part time pursuit, as it may require less of a time commitment (I appreciate this may not be the case).
Equally, in contrast with the previous blog, I’d also enjoy the challenge of working for a larger studio. However, despite completing this course, I’m still not entirely sure that my technical drawing skills will ever be good enough to work at the higher end of 2D animation, but I’d be happy to fail by trying. I’d love to try and work for a London studio like Lupus, and I met with a few of the animators there this year. I understand they have a testing process for new animators, so I’d love to give it a go to see if I can make the entry grade.
An experience like this would stand me in good stead for future work, even if working with a few others in a smaller studio setting, as a big production would expose me further to the mechanics of a producing a larger piece of work, and the various technical departments involved. I’d like to try to start at the clean up/colouring inbetweening role, but after completing my final project, I’ve realised that I really enjoy the challenge of animating a character and that would be ultimately what I would ideally do if I could find employment in this sector.
Working for myself or in a small studio set up appeals to me, as it is something I have done before. Prior to starting this course I worked by myself, animating a number of corporate animations for various organisations. However, as I was self taught, I often felt that the work lacked both a creative and technical edge. After completing this course, and having listened to some of the lecturers who are more independent in their practice, I’d like to try and continue to work independently but explore different funding schemes from the arts council/BFI etc to see if I can create work that is more creative and diverse with an artistic bent.
Reframing myself as an artist/artisan is something that I am not entirely comfortable with as I’ve previously seen using the animation process as more of a means to an end than producing artistic work. However, I’m now hoping to embrace this side of myself more following on from this course.
I’ve really enjoyed producing and creating my own work, especially the wearwolf and bodies films, and following a process through from conception to completion had always been very appealing. I’ve found the process of storytelling and creating ideas very fulfilling, which various lectures and modules on this course has really encouraged and helped me with. Working on side projects that I could submit to festivals while producing more lucrative work in the daytime would be ideal, if possible.
I decided to reach out to a few people who work in the industry for this post. I wanted to research directing, stop motion, and directing and producing your own work, as these are areas that I may be interested in trying to get into once my MA is complete.
I contacted Oskar Lehemaa, director of The Old Man Movie: Lactopalypse! (2019) after meeting him at CSM while we were working on our LIAF stop motion project.
What was the first stop motion thing you did?
I should say upfront that my background is in live action film directing, so I’m actually pretty useless as an animator. My first true foray into animation was writing and directing “The Old Man Movie” with my friend Mikk Mägi, who is an animator. He invited me to come on board the project back in 2017. Although “The Old Man Movie” was a relatively small production, it was a huge undertaking for me, considering it was my first true animation. I had to learn the principles of stop motion on the fly, and to some extent I’m still learning about animation with every new project.
I did some very crude animation experiments when I was about 12 years old, like animating a crumpled piece of paper, that sort of thing. I didn’t have the patience and persistence for it. But seeing how hard the process was definitely gave me a reverence for this art form very early on.
Why did you use stop motion to tell your story in the old man movie?
The titular character in “The Old Man Movie” was created by Mikk Mägi and Peeter Ritso years ago, when they made a short stop motion animation about a weird old guy. So the stop motion technique was always a given with this project, as it was integral to the character’s presentation. But the original Old Man short films were very small and contained stories. When it came to making a LIAFfeature length film, we decided to use the form to our advantage – we could create a huge absurd adventure with larger-than-life characters, action and monsters, without having a big live-action budget. In that sense stop motion was the only way for us to tell this crazy story.
Did you find it trickier to get funding for an animation aimed at adults?
The Old Man character had become very popular in Estonia based on the short animations Mikk and Peeter had made. So when Mikk was approached to make a full length film based on the IP, the offer came with some financing already in place. We also got funding from the Estonian government, but I think the deciding factor there was the quality of the project, rather than the IP or even the slightly more adult nature of the script. Estonia has a strong animation scene and a lot of the films funded here are sophisticated art pieces aimed at a festival audience. So “adult” animation isn’t rare at all. But of course it does get trickier once you’re aiming for feature length, since then the budgets start growing and a wider audience is expected.
I found it challenging communicating my ideas to a small team on a one minute short film. As a director on a much larger project have you got any tips on how to communicate your ideas effectively?
That is a tricky part of the job. On Old Man we learned as we went along and I still haven’t figured it out! But right now, I’d say: be precise in what you want, but leave room for your collaborators to insert their own voice into the work. For me visualization helps a lot – I doodle my ideas, find references, make mock-ups, act out movements, etc. Try to be open to the other artists’ ideas, while at the same time never losing track of the big picture, because as a director, you’re the one steering the ship.
Have you any tips for graduates trying to get their first jobs in stop motion?
I can only speak from the perspective of an animation director who has no experience as an animator… But I think internships are very valuable. On my films I worked with great up-and-coming artists who were at the time interning as animators. Also I think a solid portfolio goes a long way. After graduation you probably already have a few works under your belt, so share them on social media, so people can have a better chance finding you. But most importantly, keep making movies. You can create clever contained stop motion shorts on your table top, so there’s no excuse not to do it. That way you grow your skills and your showreel – and both those things get you closer to that job you’re looking for.
I decided to reach out to a few people who work in the industry for this post. I wanted to research directing, stop motion, and directing and producing your own work, as these are areas that I may be interested in trying to get into once my MA is complete.
Aardman/Netflix
I contacted Steph Marshall, former CSM and NFT graduate who is now working as an assistant animator at Aardman.
When did you first try stop motion?
So I’ve been dabbling with stop motion since I was quite young, just animating old toys in my room and then realised I can actually make a career out of it that’s when I went to csm.
What appeals to you about stop motion as a form of expression?
I’ve always loved animation in general just because I think it can tackle big topics without the use of dialogue. I’m not hugely confident with drawing so that’s why I lent more towards stop motion but then realising how you can just bring life and emotion to an inanimate object really fascinated me and I just rolled with it.
What do you find challenging/frustrating about stop motion?
I think all forms of animation are challenging so it’s just about being patient with the process, having an understanding of what you want to do in the industry and focusing on that. So if you wanna be an animator, I would really focus on keeping things short and simple and going over animation principles over and over again.
What projects have you worked on, and what are the key responsibilities in your job as an assistant animator for Aardman?
I’ve been at Aardman for 2 years now and I’ve worked on the new chicken run, second season of very small creatures and now I’m on the new Wallace and gromit. Our job is predominantly sculpting all the plasticine for any replacement animation but we also get to pose all the puppets for any promotional stills, we also get to test and figure out how different things are gonna get animated and we also get to animate shots, especially if your tests impress directors.
Have you any tips for graduates trying to get into the industry?
Hardest part though I’m afraid to say is keeping work consistent after graduating.Don’t be afraid to go for junior positions or even things like being a runner or reception. You wanna get an in basically. Maybe even having a part time job on the side. But little by little you start becoming part of the circle and it makes it easier for you to be the first person they wanna hire when another project happens.
I found the initial exercises such as bounce and follow through were tricky and required thought. Properly considering the weight, shape and movement of an object and how it falls, along with introducing elements of cartoon like elasticity and exaggeration proved a challenge. I tried a number of different characters; a plane, a fox and a vegetable. The vegetable proved the most successful and the more enjoyable to draw. My favourite class so far is life drawing. I’d never done any life drawing before so it was a totally new experience. Having drawn primarily from photos or imagination, the lessons were very useful in quickly breaking down the shapes and pose of the model rather than focusing on the detail. Quickly breaking down a character into their most simplistic elements will hopefully allow me to work at a greater pace. An exhibition of CGO walking cycles at 180 the strand with a group of people from the course also proved useful, as it offered a chance to study weight and movement of multiple different shaped characters, which is a part of animation I feel I struggle with. A stop motion class also proved useful on this front, allowing me to consider the weight of movement, and the followthrough of an action.
highlights of the first four weeks!
Presenting
For my presentation I managed to meet up with Richard Fawley, art director of When the Wind Blows. He was a lovely chap, and talked a lot about the complications working on a project like When the Wind blows. This involved applying the traditional techniques of cell animation and transposing it onto the physical set of the animation, a house that was constructed and then filmed and printed out as stills so the animators could work on top of it. He also brought along a few of his original drawings and worksheets from the project (included here.) I love When the Wind Blows’ mixed media approach and I’d really like to incorporate that style into my work if possible.
I found producing a presentation a real challenge. Presenting and researching a subject are things I have not had to do for a long time, so returning to a library setting to look into When the Wind Blows came as something of a shock to the system. Finding and choosing the right resources took some time, and then also knowing when to stop researching also took some time, as topics are a bit like rabbit warrens when you get into them. However, it was useful in teaching me about aspects of the animation industry and process that I had not thought about before, as well a healthy reminder that before embarking on my own projects later in the course that I should look into my ideas, stories and character designs more thoroughly, as it will hopefully add depth to my work.
I’m happy to have done a walking cycle, and I also enjoyed going to the Cezanne exhibition at the tate, love his colours and textures and again can hopefully inspire future work!
Stop Motion!
Stop motion work has been challenging and although I enjoyed creating puppets from rubbish, I was frustrated with the results. I found their movements were limited, and they were liable to break. The workshop with Joseph Wallace was great, and gave me a much better idea on how to construct a puppet. I tried to back engineer the ones I had made, but with mixed results, and soon found that the limbs I had made, were unreliable and likely to break. Filming on green screen was a fun learning curve, and the studio setting worked surprisingly well for a first attempt. Green screen offers a lot of different potential options for future projects, especially given how well it worked. The puppet movement was not as great as I’d hoped and I wish I’d put more thought into planning the short. Looking forward to exploring these techniques further, and am hoping to attend some LIFA stuff for inspiration before the Christmas break.
Art, Animation and Charcoal
I visited the William Kentridge exhibit several times when it was on at the Royal Academy, as I found his approach to animation, and art as animation, inspirational. Charcoal and mixed media is a medium that I’m not very familiar with, but his work has such a vibrant, energetic quality that I am now keen to try using it in my own process. Much of Kentridge’s work centres on the apartheid crisis in South Africa in the late 20th Century; and his absurdist and fictional short films that were on display are both shocking and comical.
The Soho films, about a fictional businessman named Soho Eckstein, intercut acts of violence and poverty alongside opulent and sexualised operatic scenes involving Soho. The charcoal brings a life and ease to the animation, and the lack of form and bubbling lines meant that I didn’t know what may come next. The rubbing out and redrawing process also has a textured, ghost-like quality which I found very appealing, and offered a constant reminder of the medium being used.
Some of his other films such as ‘Ubu Tells the Truth’ use a cruder, jauntier animation and paper puppetry to convey the same serious political observations, and served as a reminder that animation and movement do not have to prescribe to a particular rule or style to be effective.
The rest of the exhibition really felt like a wellspring of creativity as Kentridge uses drawing, tapestry, performance, sculpture, theatre and sound to continue his artistic conversation. It was a wonderfully immersive experience.
Coincidentally, we were then able to have a go at charcoal animation in the stop motion class, and I did really enjoy the freedom and excitement it offered of making something come to life so quickly (in my case a duck).
Soho Film
Stop Motioning again
For our stop motion class we were tasked with creating and producing a more complex puppet that would be fit for rigging. On designing an initial puppet of a child superhero, I decided that I wanted to spend more time developing the character, and instead of batman, I chose Owl boy for a name. (who I later discovered was a video game character, suggesting I should have researched the name more thoroughly). I continued working through the design, and investigated owls in the library and did more preparatory sketches. This also made me consider what I wanted owl boy to be, was he a superhero, a child dressed as a superhero or a child imitating an owl? I chose the latter, as it felt like a subversion of the genre and I could try and make it a little bit creepy.
The suit proved a tricky task, and my partner helped with the stitching and finishing touches. Felt is a difficult material to use, but it produces a pleasing final effect providing movement even if the character remains still. Given we had a short shooting window, I decided to make an intro to the character and it allowed me to explore owl boy’s movement to a degree. It also gave me an opportunity to test some basic lip syncing. I was slightly hampered by lack of rigging, so hopefully at some point CSM will invest in some appropriate kit. I enjoyed the task, and hope to continue to work on stop motion characters throughout my MA.
Cartoonish Villainy and Villainy
For one of my lip sync exercises I used a Donald Trump audio clip, but transposed him from being sat on a private plane in the video to gesturing from behind a podium for the animation. Trump follows a long line of theatrical political performers and before I started work on the animation, I had a brief look into the movement of the man, and the men (inevitably men) that came before him.
Our performance and movement classes have focused on gesture, sweeping definite movements and exaggeration to help us with the performance of our characters on screen. But political grandstanders already know to apply these characteristics to their performance. The violent hand gesture, stares, preening and chest puffing are greeted with derision from their critics and applause from their supporters. Since the fascistic rallies of the 1930s were filmed, leaders like Hitler and Mussolini can be seen taking full advantage of being larger than life caricatures, and it then is imitated by the animation and cartoons of the day; they are recognised and ridiculed for these performances in art, yet it does not necessarily prevent them from being both powerful and dangerous; and it also could have added to their fame and infamy. If possible, I’d like to explore these connections in future work, and focus on that connection between the strongman and his audience, and why it is abhorred and celebrated in equal measure.
Backdrop for movement
I’ve drawn and used backgrounds in animations I’ve done before starting my MA, but I often produced them for function rather than purpose; they’d sit alongside the story or create the environment but they wouldn’t necessarily offer anything much to the narrative or feature as part of the plot. I’ve never really thought a great deal about background art and as the MA’s key focus is character animation I still was not thinking about it until we had a lecture from Sue Tong.
It was a useful lecture as it made me consider and think a bit more about what and why we use and position certain backgrounds in animation, and from who’s perspective we are seeing the background or scene from.
Following this I went to see the ‘M.K. Čiurlionis; Between Worlds’ exhibition at Dulwich Picture gallery. Čiurlionis was a Lithuanian artist and musician and his work combines mythological and spiritual images merged with recognisable landscapes to create a dream like worlds. There are pyrimids that sit in futuristic, lightening filled skies and kings and Queens in forests who observe new worlds in the palms of their hands. The soft pastel colours produce pleasing, soft textures, and some of his work sits somewhere between art and illustration. Ciurlionis wanted to tell stories with his art, and much of his world feels very evocative, instantly creating a mood and a feeling of otherness. When approaching background work for some of the projects on the course, I hope to take inspiration more from work like this, to use background to really help tell the story not just to function in it.
The System’s rigged!
Since starting the stop motion module in the first term, I’ve been interested in how to animate puppets. The initial puppets we built out of clay and then out of rubbish from home were good, but I struggled to be animate them as they were limited in their movement and had a tendency to fall to pieces, so it was great when we learnt how to construct actual puppet skeletons.
After we had learnt how to do this I was determined to make mine move and more specifically jump; I wanted to see if I could get it off the floor. So I looked into rigging; sadly CSM didn’t really have any functioning rigs, so I bought one off the internet, and decided I’d make a bunny rabbit puppet for one of the lip sync exercises. My chief aim was to make it hop. However, the rig I bought could not take the weight of my bunny so after building it and hoping for a hop, I realised it would have to sit still for that exercise.
However, after some more thought, and playing around with my cheap small rig, I decided I’d try and animate a small lion toy I found in IKEA. This had the advantage of being both small and light, and coming fully formed. So I gutted it, put in a small puppet rig, and had a go. Overall I was pleased with the result. I was able to remove the rig in photoshop, but I realised that having a ‘busy background’ made this a little trickier. However my Lion did jump. This short test film may have taken several weeks to get to, but it gives me hope that with a new found understanding of the techniques, and access to the right equipment, I may be able to improve my animating skills moving forward.
Second Year Student Project Report
I was paired with Maria Joao, who is still in the early production stages of their animation. Maria’s plan is to work in clay, and her story focuses on a gender fluid alien world, where the central character experiences sexual awaking, while being imprisoned in a phallic plant tower which grows and self inseminates.
Maria asked me to do a test in 2.5D clay of the tower, and to feedback on my experience about constructing it, and any issues I encountered. I completed the task, and Maria said that I had ‘(dealt) in advance with a lot of the issues, and (she) can now predict them a bit better.’ And that it was ‘a great attempt and (I had) found a really interesting solution’.
It was an interesting assignment; although I have enjoyed the stop motion part of the course, clay is still not a medium that I am very familiar with, and it proved rather tricky material to manipulate. Shooting in 2.5D proved challenging, as building layers with a box and perspex sheets (see pictures) meant dealing with glare and weight issues (the plant was too heavy for the perspex so had to have additional support). This meant that I eventually shot the foreground separately and added it as a different layer in After Effects. Shooting was enjoyable, and I was pleased with the bubbling effects, and I was reasonably happy with the overall result.
If I could improve upon the project, I think I would have spent longer shooting, and perhaps built a larger model which would have allowed for a greater amount of detail. I would have also used wire to attach the penises to the plant to make continuity easier when manipulating them. I also think the equipment provided needed to be better to achieve a greater degree of success; the box was fragile and unstable and meant that it was significantly harder to make fine adjustments to the work.
Testing work and ideas is an important aspect of the animation industry, so it was fun to have a go at testing a backdrop, and was hopefully useful to Maria in demonstrating some of the positives and negatives of this medium, albeit with my limited skill set.
It felt like a successful collaboration, as Maria met with me in person, and she was very helpful guiding me through her idea and what she wanted me to try and do, and she seemed happy with the quality of work I produced.
2.5D animation was a new experience for me, and although it was tricky, I felt that the previous work I had done on the stop motion course, such as working with clay and shooting with dragon frame, helped me a lot. This then meant that the process was not too arduous or overwhelming.
I thoroughly enjoyed the project and the challenge of producing work for another student, and it hopefully will translate to me being able to work well with other students and professionals moving forward.
Struggling with form
One of my favourite classes from the first two terms has been the life drawing with Vanessa. The classes are very instructive, and having never done life drawing before I have found it a real challenge. The breaking down of people into shapes and structures to convey movement has been really useful and thought provoking. However, I feel like I’m not making a great deal of progress. I still struggle to produce forms and shapes that immediately suggest what the model is doing, and I feel I must work harder to perfect my technique over the coming terms and years. Despite wanting to be an animator, I often feel that my natural skill is lacking, and these classes have certainly emphasised that. I hope that the more I do, the better I will eventually become. These images are from the most recent class I went to:
