On the Set - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 225

Hard things to animate
Probably one of the hardest things to animate in stop motion is a snake. To progress a snake
forward you cannot just move it a fraction; every element of the whole body has to be
radically rearranged, as each bit of the snake i nds itself on a dif erent part of a curve in every
frame. I've often pondered how to animate a snake. I thought of having a featureless skin
and a long body made up of identical replacements, with just the head and tail being
dif erent. Each frame you could take the head of and take a piece from the end and put
it behind the head. That way it would have progressed a bit without having disturbed the
whole body, but that would only work with identical replacements, and you would be stuck
with a certain speed and no taper to the body. In fact, that's a pretty useless method unless
highly stylised. Perhaps if you slackened all the joints of an armatured puppet, it could
be manipulated easily along a preplotted clear path, and you might not notice too much
twitching as you reshaped it for each frame. Alternatively, you could rethink the whole
movement, basing it on one of those side-winding snakes that get themselves into a certain
condensed shape and then spring themselves forward. Dif erent snakes move in dif erent ways,
and it is a hard movement to replicate, although probably the rhythm is the storytelling factor
here. In an advert for Aardman and Ariston I did venture to animate a snake, although this was
highly stylised as it was a tie and was vertical like a cobra. As the front section locked of , the
back was brought up tight and then the front was levered forward. Then all this was repeated.
It was a good ef ect, but hardly true to snakes. The realistic way is not always the best way to
animate.
Touching
A rare tender moment
in Rigoletto .