On the Set - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 228

because of the mysterious outsider and the nasty twist in the story. I would dei nitely like to
return to it one day. Our i lm just about stands up today, but it was quite remarkable at the time,
considering what else was on television. A few years later, Jiri Barta's extraordinary, dark and
vicious animated wood-carving version came along and became perhaps the dei nitive version
of the story. It featured amazing chunky puppets carved out of wood as if they had stepped of
some wooden panelling. Our version was clearly intended for families, but Barta's provided the
imagination and truly unsettling nature that perhaps ours did not quite have.
There are other circumstances where you have to work hard, animating for very little obvious
result: a character leaning forward against a wall, for example. It looks so simple on i lm, and
the easiest way would be to lean the character in, while holding his hands l at against the wall
with your i ngers. As you push the character forward you keep his hands in place, by keeping
them located, which is much harder than it seems. Animation looks pretty clumsy when the
point of contact, like shoes on the l oor, or hands against the wall, is slipping all over the place.
It instantly ruins any illusion of contact and weight. The most practical way to do this scene
would be to draw the exact position of the hands on the monitor, or make some subtle visual
mark on the set itself. For each frame that the character is moving forward, it is likely that you
will need to pull him back a bit, then readjust his arms by pulling them back, allowing some
space for the body to move forward. You will then need to reposition them precisely again,
adjusting the angle of the wrists for maximum contact. Any form of contact is hugely i ddly to
get right, but the results will look easy and natural.
On the studio fl oor
The studio set-up is highly dependent on budgets and schedules, but it is unlikely that one
animator is going to i lm every shot, whatever the size of production. Usually several shoots
are i lming at once, needing duplicate puppets, duplicate props and often duplicate sets.
The recognised way of working is to allocate one animator to each camera set-up, but
I have worked in many set-ups. On some of the early shoots there was a team of animators,
each with specii c characters that were yours alone. This successfully gives a consistency of
performance throughout the i lm, but it is less successful around the camera itself. With a
team of two or three, it can mean a lot of downtime for those animators whose characters are
not involved in the shot, and there is nothing worse than a restless animator. Even worse was
having one animator animating the shot, while the other sat down and clicked the button
and operated whatever technology was necessary. This led to awkward body language and
uncomfortable situations involving hierarchy. The animator at the set cannot help feeling
slightly superior to the one with the menial task of pressing the button, or feeling a little
embarrassed about continually asking the other to press the button, or keeping them waiting,
and having to say 'thank you. You feel that chat is required, or feel rude for asking for silence
while you concentrate. Just having a presence there the whole time adds unnecessary tension.
Animators may be performers, but they do not like audiences. It is a minei eld of
etiquette and invasion of personal space. It requires animators to communicate
like dancers. If you don't talk and work out exactly what happens on the set, you
will end up with characters happily doing their own thing in their own space
in a dead shot. Under these circumstances I can tell which puppets were mine,
and there is an invisible line drawn down the shot, dividing the puppets of the
two animators. Achieving any spontaneity and reaction among the puppets