Preparation - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 164

looked great in the studio, but of course during the animation these live plants grew slightly, and when
the rushes came back it looked like they were auditioning for the title sequence of Tales of the Unexpected .
One thing you do in this industry is learn from your mistakes.
Another set by Matt Sanders for Hamilton Mattress , using the Pepper's ghost principle.
When I was asked to design sets for a revival of Pingu the penguin, I was faced with the unenviable task
of watching all 104 previous episodes, in order to match the continuity of style. And I discovered that
Pingu's igloo had changed shape about four times, his front door was sometimes white, sometimes blue,
sometimes yellow - indeed sometimes different colours in the same episode - so much for continuity!
Perhaps the longest single design project I worked on was Hamilton Mattress , which featured many
interesting locations, from a desert and forest, to a glitzy city and its seedy underbelly. Some of these sets
were large, but of course there's only a limited amount of space in the studio, so the forest for instance
was kept to quite a small size, by placing the trees close together, so you couldn't see far between them.
But then a shot called for Feldwick (a caterpillar) to climb up a tree-trunk, and the camera to follow and
look up into the canopy. Obviously we couldn't fi t full-height trees into the studio, but nor could the shot
be done as a miniature, since the puppet was in the frame, so instead about forty trees were built in forced
perspective with exaggerated taper, and then (the diffi cult bit!) they were held at different angles to cheat
the perspective, so the camera could shoot horizontally whilst appearing to look upwards. In order to hold
all these trees in place at the correct angles, a large conical plywood tunnel was constructed, ten feet in
diameter - the studio crew subsequently christened it the Stargate!