Preparation - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 173

was fascinated by the illusion of having a set and infl uencing the audience's emotional response to it. I
lit stage shows whilst doing my degree, seeing a set of bland objects on a theatre set come to life with
lighting. Linked to an interest in photography (my father being a keen amateur photographer) I found
myself becoming a miniature lighting cameraman.
There is still something fascinating and absorbing about being given a model set, something on which
static puppets will be brought to life, and being asked to give it atmosphere and vitality through lighting.
It's a precise business compared to live action lighting because you're often after the same effects,
separation, delineation, etc., but the physical space is so much smaller so different techniques apply.
The animator and the camera are likely to be close to the set and the lighting must work around them
and still do its job. From the start I thought that we should light our sets with the same approach to
the drama as a live-action fi lm. There's always been a tendency to have fl at, overall lighting, for ease
of shooting and speedy set-ups, but perhaps nobody considered the potential. My theatre experience
showed me techniques which could be precise using profi le lanterns, which weren't generally used by
the fi lm industry at the time. Whenever possible I give our miniature sets some atmosphere and life in
exactly the same way as lighting cameraman would do on a drama. I'm pleased this is something which
distinguishes the Aardman output, particular the feature fi lms. They look like full-blown fi lms and you
are drawn into the fi lm rather more than you might be. It's all fi lm-making, we just do it on a smaller
scale and take a lot longer. The animators appreciate the effort put into the lighting as it gives their
work more punch and drama, making the whole thing more believable for the audience, if you can call
something like chickens trying to build an ornithopter a believable activity!
Water
Water is another special ef ect that never used to work in the old movies. You just cannot create
the illusion of huge waves by i lming a model boat at high speed in a tank and thrashing about
in the water. It comes back to texture, and how things behave. Blown-up water tends to look
like syrup, and the motion of the boat being tossed about has little resemblance to a huge
vessel. This is one area where CG has made things so much better. The i rst CG water was pretty
awful but now it is utterly convincing.
On The Wind in the Willows , animating water and animating on water was a daily problem.
Our huge tanks were barely more than eight inches deep, and being so shallow there was
little density in the water's appearance. The beautiful i shtank pebbles on the bottom were
too visible, whereas in a real river you can scarcely see the bottom, no matter how clean the
water is. I remember pouring milk into the tanks to cloud them, but that smelt too awful.
Eventually we found a chemical that gave the water a viscosity and a fantastic feeling of depth.
Plunging one's hand into this thickened liquid was most unpleasant, but that
viscosity allowed a certain amount of surface animation. You could place a leaf
on the surface and it wouldn't l oat away. Even Ratty's boat sat there comfortably.
The drawback was that while it looked to have depth it was terribly lifeless, with
no movement. Reeds and things could be animated, but the water was dead.
The solution was the trusty gobo, an old theatre trick. Light shone through an
animated revolving disc gave the water movement it didn't have.