Evolving into Stop Motion - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 11

of the screen a couple of i lm seconds later, as if nothing had happened. The audience sees
these two sequences next to each other, appearing to be in the same time scale, but minutes,
maybe hours, have passed between those two frames. There are always at least two time scales
going on at one moment. The animator, looking at his barsheet, measures time in inches, like
a conductor measures time from the bars on a music score. An animator's day is structured
around the few seconds he will shoot, and a day is judged to be a long one if it is about twelve
seconds, or maybe an easy day if it is only four seconds long … little wonder that animators are
a delightfully strange breed, often existing in their own world.
An animator is an actor, just a rather slow one. An actor goes on stage to perform, and when
he's done all manner of real life happens in the wings. He returns to the stage to carry on a
scene that will have progressed in stage time. If his performance relates to his previous scene,
there will be a continuity of action and character and the audience will be unaware of the fact
that the actor's had time to phone his agent. Likewise on i lm, a character is seen to walk out
of a door, onto a street in one apparently continuous movement; in reality, the street scene
may have been shot months later, many miles from the interior location, but as long as the
movement and continuity details relate the two scenes, no-one will notice. Stop motion often
uses identical puppets of the characters, and the viewer is unlikely to notice that a puppet
used in the i rst shot is not the same used in the second shot … if the acting is similar. When
the musical Starlight Express opened in a hot summer, the performers were not used to the
physical demands of singing and roller skating in heavy rubber costumes, and often passed out
from exhaustion. There were always identically dressed standby performers ready in the wings.
With the constant through line of the visuals and the choreography, often the audience was
none the wiser, though hopefully they were told of dif erent performers. Getting sidetracked,
but on the theme of continuity, when I saw my i rst cycle of Wagner's four Ring operas, I was
naively disconcerted by Brunhilde being sent to sleep surrounded by i re at the end of Tuesday
night, only for her to wake up on Thursday several stones lighter, a few inches taller, dressed
dif erently and with a dif erent voice. My demands for continuity were overruled by being told
that it was a convention and that I could not expect one performer to sing the whole role. Well,
actually I could … convention or no convention; I did make a mental note about keeping the
integrity of a piece.
This is about seamlessly linking the pieces of the story (in our case the frames), making the
action l ow dramatically, regardless of the trickery in the gaps. An audience looking at the actor
is seldom aware of the behind-the-scenes ef ort and expertise that have got him there. The
stage or screen is all they need to believe the illusion. It's harder for stop motion to keep this
continuity and l ow of action, as the production process simply does not l ow. Months often
separate neighbouring shots, and several animators may have worked on the same piece of
action. Juggling all this and giving it a unity is the hard, unsung job of the animation director.
Stop motion needs more frames to explain the action than most animation. The brain has to
work to put in the missing information, since there is, generally, no blurring of
the image, helping to suggest the weight, the direction and the speed of a move.
We need to help the eye, and the ear, to relate every frame to the following and
previous frames. A live-action i lm shows a limb moving forward with the trailing
part of the limb blurred, making it clear which way the limb is travelling. We have
to tell the story of a movement more clearly. A wrist trailing behind a forward-
moving limb would emphasise the movement. This is not necessarily realistic, but