Getting Moving - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 193

10

Getting Moving

Being an animator
Throughout history, as soon as a skill or technology developed enabling some sort of image
to be drawn or captured, people at once wanted to give it life. The buf alo cave drawings, once
their artists seemed satisi ed with the representation, were given multiple limbs to suggest
movement. Giotto managed to suggest movement by depicting the main character in various
stages of the story: an early storyboard. Once photography had developed, it wasn't long
before the images started to move. As soon as computer imagery appeared, it started to move.
Creating life in whatever form seems an unavoidable instinct.

Ethan Marak, animator

As I work I think about what goes on between the frames. One of the big differences
between stop motion and computer animation has to do with the process with which the
movement is created. I have worked in both forms, and have spent long hours pushing
both pixels and puppets. While both techniques are capable of producing beautiful
animation, there is something unique to the stop motion process that I crave when
working at a computer. I miss the energy of human interaction with the physical world.
I feel that all stop motion animation is infused with this energy; even a beginner's jittery
fi rst attempts at stop motion are more interesting than much of the silky-smooth CGI
out there. The stop motion animator is having physical interaction with the puppet in
every frame. Time folds and condenses an hour of work into a second or two of fi nished
animation. Between frames, the animator is forcing their will on the inanimate, coaxing it
to life. Focusing thoughts into tangible, real stuff. With any creative act, the mental state
fl uctuates throughout the process. All sorts of thoughts and feelings bounce around as I
am animating. Frame 10, feeling good, focused. Frame 30, should I take a break? Frame
76, did I turn the stove off? Frame 125, almost done! Is it possible that these moments are
not completely separate from the animation, and that the energy exchange between the
animator and the puppet is somehow refl ected in the fi nal product?

I'm not sure that I would call it a soul as such, but when we are animating we give our puppets
something that perhaps other techniques cannot. Through all that touching, the sheer
physicality and the painstaking labour, something does cross into the puppet through a kind of
osmosis. Animators do bond with their puppets, although that's not a given. There have been