On the Set - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 227

Takako and Naoki's brief moment together in Screen Play .
Circles
Another dii cult situation to animate is characters or objects in a circle. Imagine a group of a
dozen characters dancing in a ring, or even twelve coins in a circle, and they need to move to
the left. Number 1 needs to move i rst, but it can't as number 12 is in its way, so practically you'd
need to remove a puppet each frame to allow the progression forward of all the others, and
then carefully replace it. This is tricky, as it is nearly impossible to remove a puppet and then try
to get its feet back in the same position, but there are moments when we have to take a puppet
out of the set to be able to animate it. Imagine the dii culty of animating twelve characters in a
circle all holding hands. An answer to this would be either to change the choreography, or to use
some very creative camera angles, where there are some master shots, where we see everything,
but then in subsequent shots just give the impression of dancing. I did a commercial shoot
involving an animated face made up of hundreds of peas and grains of rice, very much like an
Arcimboldo painting. Not only did I not have the time to animate each grain into a new position,
but the face would have twitched hideously, looking as though its face was crawling. A lot of
movement was required out of the face, and thankfully there was a plain background: so plain
that you couldn't tell it that actually moved on a turntable each frame, giving the impression
of the face moving. I moved certain elements of the face at the same time to confuse the issue.
Happily it worked well, otherwise I might still have been counting those grains of rice today.
A similar cheat was with the many rats in The Pied Piper of Hamelin for Cosgrove Hall. There were
just not enough hours in the day to animate each of those rats. Admittedly, there wasn't much to
animate on them, as they were two inches of solid l ocked rubber with an animatable
tail. We were relying on sheer force of numbers rather than beautiful animation.
We started to animate them individually, but tore our hair out very quickly,
especially when there were a few we had forgotten. The solution to moving them all
was to stick groups of them on some i ne netting and drag the netting along
for each frame. Cheap, and in the context it worked adequately. So that it didn't look
too mechanical and uniform, we animated a few separate rats darting in and out
of the main crowd. The Pied Piper is a story that has always been with me, particular