Different Techniques - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 132

in a new position, or even just replacing a head with a dif erently sculpted shape. Although the
results can be staggering, there isn't much fun in the actual animation process. This is purely
seli sh as the audience doesn't need to know about technique. In general, the fun and decisions
are to be had in the preproduction stage by the director, designer and the model-makers, when
the various replacements are sculpted. This leaves rather little spontaneity in the actual shooting.
The performance has, for the most part, already been created by the time the animator arrives, but
it's impressive to see, for example, faces and limbs repeatedly stretching and distorting in ways
that no armatures could allow. Replacements permit easy repetition of mechanical movements,
or choreography of massed ranks of puppets all perfectly synchronised. Cycles are perfect for
replacement animation. You could even mix replacements of a cycle of a horse trotting, but with
a fully armatured puppet riding it. The substituting of one previously sculpted puppet for one in
a dif erent position is probably quite tedious and labour intensive, but then we should remember
that this is for the audience, not for us, and it's the end results that matter. George Pal and his great
Puppetoons use this technique in many i lms to great ef ect. He made dozens of commercials with
hundreds of soldiers, machine parts or less i gurative characters marching about in unison; you
can understand how the process of animation is speeded up by replacing a pair of legs sculpted
in the extreme pose with a pair of legs in the closed position, or just replacing the whole i gure
with a slightly dif erent one. Some of the facial expressions he managed with his characters
are amazingly l uid and full of character, but I would have felt cheated as an animator, as there
wouldn't have been much I could have brought to the performance. You're rather stuck with what
has been sculpted, and to some extent the animator's skill is excluded and reduced to something
mechanical. Also, there is not the one single puppet, and the relationship between puppet and
puppeteer is diluted. Replacements do not allow for those telling spontaneous movements, or
for that ever so subtle easing in and out of a movement that only a human hand can do. George
Pal didn't just limit himself to the replacement technique, and it's dei nitely worth looking at the
sequences he directed in The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm . There's a sustained stop
motion dragon sequence, involving a live actor, with some impressive animation, mixed with
some full-scale model work. An equally long sequence with some rather hyper elves cobbling
real shoes has the elves as leathery as the shoes they are i xing. Both sequences are hampered
by some annoyingly inappropriate 'cartoon' sound ef ects. But do i nd the lovely throwaway shot
when Russ Tamblyn discards some drugged wine into a plant pot. The plant, beautifully animated
by Jim Danforth, has a wonderfully melodramatic swoon worthy of any diva.
Was your fi rst fi lm meticulously planned, and were you already impatient
for your second fi lm? Did you base the fi lm on something else or was it
entirely original? Did any of your favourite themes start to appear?
JD - Venture into Space was an all-miniature fi lm, probably an outgrowth of the various George Pal fi lms,
like Destination Moon. Snag of Time was meant to be taken seriously. It derived from the dinosaur genre,
with a sequence in which a fellow gets gored by a triceratops, as in Lost Continent . I became aware of
that similarity only recently when writing about it for my memoir. We shot part of the fi lm in the Los
Angeles county arboretum - the same location used for many Tarzan fi lms. I was a 'promoter' even in
those days and talked the administrators into letting us fi lm there at no cost. The fi lm existed until just a
few years ago, but I've been unable to fi nd it. I've one or two stills. The fi lm was somewhat inventive in
that it involved time travel, which I don't believe had been done fi lmically at that time (1956). I probably
got that idea from Dr Wunmug's time machine in the Alley Oop comic strip. I used the same basic idea,