Using the Body - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 240

synchrony with the music, but you are also watching someone overcome physical constraints
such as gravity, anatomy and exhaustion, all while making it look ef ortless. To animate a
ballerina in drawn animation or in CG, you immediately take away the physicality. It becomes
merely a series of elegant shapes and movements. There isn't the excitement of 'will they
get through it?' Stop motion still has the physical side to overcome, as well as a sort of live
performance to it. Usually a stop-frame animator will endeavour to complete a shot in spite
of technology, blowing lamps, schedules, fatigue, heat, sagging puppets, etc. Starting a stop-
frame shot is unique in animation. It does have spontaneity, an improvisational quality that is
both scary and exciting. This element is the adrenaline rush.
Suspended animation
In the wacky world of animation, characters are forever jumping or running, or bounding with
leaps and exaggerated walks that happen to leave the ground for a few frames. An early jump I
did was in the Pied Piper of Hamelin , where some thin brass rods, carefully angled to be as invisible
as possible, assisted the Piper to look like he was jumping, although he was merely climbing and
balancing on these supports. A very cheap trick but it worked. Even cheaper was a young child
skipping around, framed so as only to see her torso and legs, her head supported out of shot.
A tricky shot of Toad balancing on a bicycle saw him hanging from an anglepoise lamp with
i shing line and sticky tape. Imaginative, if not very technical or precise! During The Wind in
the Willows we became familiar with Climpex, a godsend to animators. It's a range of easily
movable and tightened rods and joints. A goalpost frame can be constructed just outside the
shot to suspend the character. This was all very basic and time consuming, but shooting on
i lm is very kind to puppets hanging by i shing line, making it almost invisible. This depended
on the lighting and the background, but it was easy to hide the line with a marker pen or an
antil are spray. A cheaper trick was to knock the hanging puppet gently an instant before the
frame was taken, thus blurring the line into insignii cance.
Thin tungsten line is often used to suspend characters. It is so thin as to be practically invisible,
and often animators appear to be struggling with nothing in their hands. The drawback of
tungsten is that it snaps with the slightest jerk, and gets itself into very tight knots. In some
older i lms you can still see the wires suspending characters or props. Pal's decision to deprive
his Martians of tripods in his War of the Worlds feature must have led to some angst on the set.
In spite of all the lighting ef ects you can still see the many wires too clearly. Shooting on digital
now cruelly exposes such methods. Animators now often suspend characters on blue rods and
rigs, i lmed against blue screen. These will be later matted out.
Most puppets now are designed with one, or even two rigging points somewhere on their
body. Invariably, this point will be in the wrong place for some shots, but immensely useful in
others. A metal rod, preferably square to prevent any slipping, is inserted into a predetermined
tight-i tting hole on the puppet. This rod is attached to a series of short
manoeuvrable joints, which in turn are attached to a l at base that can be attached
i rmly to the set. The joints are sui ciently tight to support the puppet of the
ground for when jumping. This is i ne and helps the animators to produce some
lively animation, but in postproduction there is no button marked 'rig removal,
however much blue paint is valiantly applied to the rigs. The poor technician
whose painstaking job is rig removal has dei nitely drawn the short straw.