Using the Body - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 246

The lip-sync on the cat and the human characters were extreme shapes with no in-betweens or
neutrals. It was all either or nothing. It was liberating but not something I felt comfortable with, and
admired the animators who almost literally threw the puppets around the set. I wanted to work
out every cause and ef ect of each move, letting the action start somewhere, seeing it travel, letting
it read, and then letting it i nish. All that was required was fast action. To animate like that you still
need to learn to animate all the mechanical detail i rst before throwing it away. Like anything, you
have to learn something properly before you can be seen to get it deliberately wrong.
My boldest move was as Achilles crouched over the body of Hector. The mythical arrow was
i red into his heel, and to express the pain I'd got him in the hunched position so he could
l ing himself backwards in literally a couple of frames. They were huge frames and i lming
them I worried that I had pushed the moves too far, but by adding a couple of tiny moves
that brought him to a strong, clear pose, the big moves made sense, and the whole action
expressed a suitable pained jerk and a relaxation to it.
Achilles at the end of a huge move.
Similarly, if a character is required to be pretty manic with arms l ailing about,
the moves can look random and disconnected. The trick here is to have one part
of the character totally controlled and moving at a slower pace, or even totally
planted in a specii c spot. This makes the wildness look deliberate, and it gives
the character moves of dif erent speeds, much as Pachelbel's Canon , in which one
melody trundles on while others weave in and out ever more furiously. The worst
animation has everything moving at the same speed with no sign of inertia or