Different Techniques - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 137

Muybridge fi gure running (Steve Boot).
echoed Muybridge's set-up and kept the perspective constant. I knew my walk cycles well
enough and the man seemed contented to be physically manhandled. I kept talking about
the strong key poses in a walk cycle, asking him to emphasise the storytelling moment of a
walk when the front leg is stretched with the weight on the heel, and the back leg is starting
to peel of . This honed athlete was a hurdler, used to doing everything at great speed, and the
idea of working out what his body was doing at a given split moment quite alien to him. He
was not able to coordinate himself under these conditions. I'm the opposite these days. I'm so
conscious of what shapes my body should be making to express a movement that I don't think
I can do anything spontaneously. As a live performer I have lost all the coordination that I can
do so well as an animator.
The punchline with the naked athlete was that animating him just didn't work, so we tried
i lming both at high speed and at slow speed, but the rushes showed both a slow walk with
an inappropriately mobile set of genitals and then the opposite. It was an important lesson in
getting the balance between the ef ort of an action and the ef ect; that, or don't attempt to
animate naked bodies. Photographic reproductions of Muybridge won out in the end. Having
extra cameras would have worked, or at least a camera that tracked precisely with
the i gure, as would have animating with a puppet. Once again it's about choosing
the right technique for the subject. Muybridge, in so many ways, knew what he was
talking about, and his photos of i gures and animals in action are still a fascinating,
invaluable and essential part of any animator's background. Like many great icons,
his images have been overused these days, and probably lost their innovative
freshness, but do try to look at them with open eyes. They are quite startling.