Using the Body - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 239

Toad an animatable scarf whenever he was in a vehicle, not just as a nod to his fashion sense,
but because a scarf l apping behind him does so much to suggest an illusion of movement.
Likewise, hair and clothes l owing behind help the illusion. To see a character running at full
pelt with a long coat hanging motionless around its legs totally defeats what we are trying to
do. It's more ef ective to see the coat billowing out behind. When designing a character, always
think of what clothing can be added to suggest this movement.
Likewise, a shot travelling with a plane l ying against a clear blue sky will look very static as
there is nothing to show it is moving. Moving shadows across it from unseen clouds suddenly
suggest that it's moving.
All this is about giving the illusion that the character is securely located and existing in its own
physical world, not necessarily a real world, but a very credible world, and one that has its own
laws and logic. The more ways the puppet can interact with its world, the better. Often CG
characters that have been composited into drawn or model or even CG worlds do not match
the lighting, or worse, the very solid character has no shadow falling on the ground. Suddenly
credibility is gone, and even the youngest viewer feels that something is not quite right. If the
puppet is not connected to its world, then neither is the audience.
Falling leaves as a dramatic element are ripe for a full thesis, but apart from suggesting
movement, they usually come with an emotional connotation, much in the way that falling
snow is shorthand for evoking certain feelings. Invariably, falling leaves contrive to suggest an
ending, usually where melancholy is appropriate. Leaves fall in Screen Play to suggest loss. If Toad
were to drive into a thick tree trunk, as he invariably did, leaves l uttering down would show
a more credible expression of impact than a cartoon wobble of the tree itself. All the time we
are trying to i nd ways to suggest a movement, an energy and an inertia that just isn't there. It's
about i nding what the truthful storytelling moment of a scene is. What exactly is the gesture
or movement that tells us what we need to know? What tells us that something is going fast?
For example, how do we know if it is windy in a scene, when we can't see the wind? A sound
ef ect can be used, or a character can tell us, both of which make for rather lazy i lm-making.
More ef ective is to contrive to put things in the scene that can be af ected by the wind. Leaves,
newspapers, l apping l ags, doors banging away. There's a whole repertoire of tricks available.
Again, it would be hard to suggest a windy day in a wide-open barren concrete landscape. In
that instance one would have to resort to sound, or maybe the luxury of having moving shadows
on the l oor, but a strongly discernible movement is much more visually satisfying and evocative.
In an episode of Rupert Bear that I directed, half the cast of characters were invisible for much
of the show. This added a surreal quality to the story, but also it was an economical way of
shooting; well, sort of economical, as again it's all about suggesting what's not there. Shots
without a character in were very dull, but shots with the invisible characters giving signs of
their presence were more interesting. We create movement by stopping things, so we create
invisibility by showing things, a nice irony. If a character were invisible he wouldn't
bump against everything, just as those police cars wouldn't hit every cardboard
box, but doing so places the characters in the world. Animation is about not the
real but the suggestion.
An element of stop motion is the equivalent of watching a dancer perform those
thirty-two fouettés in Swan Lake . You are watching the beautiful lines and the