Different Techniques - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 136

Replacements can give the energy of a drawn i lm with exaggerated squash and stretch, but
usually there are signs that give away substitutions and replacements. I watched an episode
of Chorlton and the Wheelies recently that I had worked on, where Chorlton the dragon lost his
spots and they migrated to the other characters. That's easy to write in the script but as these
other characters had faces that were removed and replaced by a dif erent expression, this
meant trying to match up the exact placing of the stick-on spots. That they didn't match gave
more random movement in the face than necessary.
The charming and mischievous Pingu is for the most part animated with replacements, and the
on-screen ef ect looks pretty spontaneous, but I can't imagine it being much fun to animate.
The performance element is rather limited to the choice of which beak to put on. For all that
though, the results are charming.
Pixilation
Here's a fascinating technique, saving the building of puppets and miniature sets, which can
be done with the most limited of resources. Often, as in the i lms of Norman Maclaren, human
actors are animated frame by frame in real sets or locations, doing impossible things such
as sliding around the l oor without walking, then disappearing through walls, or changing
costume instantly. Buster Keaton and Georges Méliès l irted with this technique. It was really
a special ef ect using an animation technique, but more recently there have been astonishing
uses of pixilation with i lms like The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb , where human actors have
been animated interacting intimately with animated puppets, in this instance a miniature
clay i gure. The results are gloriously disturbing, but a lot depends on the skill of the human
performers to sustain their physically draining poses. With the Aardman series Angry Kid ,
various techniques all came together for something unique. Real actors were used wearing
masks that were changed for dif erent expressions or lip-sync. This determined that the actors
would be pixilated with the masks changed every few frames. This calls for a lot of planning,
especially with the masks, but the ef ect is pretty extraordinary.
I was involved with the groundbreaking Manchester Evening News commercial for Aardman,
where the uniquely talented Nick Upton sat in a chair while his environment was pixilated
behind him. The shoot took over three weeks and saw him being dunked in a swimming pool,
placed in a football ground and sat under Jodrell Bank telescope dish, while it was animated
behind him: surely the largest thing ever to be animated. This remarkable commercial would
probably be done with computers today and would dei nitely lose some of its charm.
Eadweard Muybridge
I was asked to reconstruct a Muybridge sequence of a naked man running. The original
Muybridge used a series of several dozen cameras parallel to the action, all triggered step by
step by a tripwire or other means as the athlete ran by. For this shoot, we had just
one camera, locked in a i xed viewpoint. As the athlete ran across the studio, the
parallax changed as he progressed through the shot, i rst favouring his front then
his rear. The producers were hoping, as many animation students have done, to
put this into a loop, but the changing perspective made nonsense of that. This
surprised the producers, so I suggested physically animating the man standing
on the spot, giving the impression that he was moving, which would have at least