Preparation - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 157

be adjusted, and if the plotted action l owed and everything i tted like a jigsaw, you'll have to
make substantial changes as the jigsaw pieces will no longer i t.
Ideally, it's good to have the artist around for the whole boarding process, so that frames can
be redrawn. This is seldom economic or practical, so I prefer to have my boards drawn with one
page representing just one shot. It is essential that a board can be l exible. A drawing showing
the start of the shot and, if there's been signii cant movement, one at the end helps. One page a
shot speeds up deforestation (and takes up a lot of wall space), but hopefully it saves resources
elsewhere, and electronic boards make life easier. I'm fussy about which shots go next to each
other and for weeks I play with the sequence of shots, taking drawings out or moving them
around, until I'm satisi ed that the whole piece l ows. Editing should be practically invisible,
with shots following each other naturally and unnoticed, and this only comes from much work
on the storyboard. With multiple panels I i nd it hard to rearrange things, and this leads to
crossing out and confusion, with shots ending up numbered 120 B, part 2 (there is no 119!). The
artist has to be especially careful with stop motion, where the puppets do not necessarily have
the squash and stretch of his drawings. Too often clients or producers see a particularly lively
board with a character at full stretch and are disappointed when the puppet doesn't replicate
that pose. Likewise, a board is just one drawing for several seconds of i lm, and it takes some
imagination from the same clients to translate drawings into moving puppets.
I try for the ideal timing, sometimes hoping for long, sustained shots, but the practical process
of shooting stop motion can conspire against this. The sheer mechanics needed to keep
animators constantly shooting means that sometimes an hour left of studio time does not
allow for a lengthy shot, so a short shot has to be found, even if it means dividing an originally
longer shot. Likewise, a long shot that was shooting all day and which now looks unlikely
to be i nished has to have a small close-up inserted to cover any potential light change. It's
inadvisable to leave stop-frame shots overnight, as so much can go wrong. The sheer heat
and cooling down of the lights makes sets expand and contract, however well they're made.
Puppets can also move around owing to temperature changes or from being left in awkward
positions with the skin under tension. Often, the animator is in a dif erent frame of mind in the
morning from the previous evening, and it's surprising how this can af ect the animation. Like
the animator himself, morning animation can be lively, unhurried and detailed. After a hot,
sweaty, smelly day animation is invariably rushed. I look at my own animation and know when
a shot was i lmed. Shots evolve for numerous reasons, and this has all manner of repercussions
with the board, so storyboards need to be versatile …
The development from storyboards to animatics and now animated previz allows the director
to move the camera around a virtual set, looking for the right angle, before committing to
expensive studio time. This throws up a million options, sometimes too many. Having done
previz for other directors I found it hard to keep the staging to a general world view, as I'm
itching to tell the story using precise set-ups. I'm used to tight schedules making me try to
be focused and get things right i rst time. I tend to stage specii cally for a given
camera position rather than let the camera sit there recording. Similarly, with
computer graphics (CG) animation you can move the camera round an animating
character to see it moving from any angle, and probably discover interesting
angles and shapes. This has so many advantages, especially in terms of possibly
using a shot again, but I'm probably still stuck trying to compose the body for a
particular perspective and camera angle that lets the gesture read for the best.