I was so happy with this puppet I couldn’t wait to animate it. The first exercise I tried with it was for the body acting assignment – having a character react to something using body language. For this one I wanted to just focus on getting to grips with the process of stop motion animation and not worry about facial expression or set details. Because Snotty is quite a melancholy guy the first thing that came to mind was to have him be scared of something.
I animated this with the help of Steph – who suggested to record a reference of ourselves acting the scene out and then importing it into Dragonframe so we had a guide to follow for the timing and movement. I found this really helpful and got this one done in a short amount of time. I would like to try this again because although I am happy with the overall performance, I think I could make it a lot more fluid and interesting now that I have more understanding of the process.
Facial Animation
I decided to also use Snotty for the facial acting exercise. I was anxious to go straight into animation so I thought it would be a good idea to experiment with creating some different expressions and take pictures to use as a reference. I had initially painted on the mouth and eyebrows which allowed for no movement in these areas, so I painted over them and replaced them with plasticine that I was able to manipulate.
Curious Angry Determined Happy Scared Tired/Pain Weary Bored Shocked Content
I had planned on making separate eyebrows and mouths for different expressions but once I had tried out the expressions I thought it would be easier to mould them as I went (I was wrong).
I shot some reference footage of myself and I also thought it would be useful to draw out a reference so I could work out the timing of the action.
I hadn’t really thought about the set before I went into animating so I had to improvise with this make-shift table which was impractically wobbly. I tried to stick it down with plasticine and tape but it didn’t really work – I think something magnetic would be much better in the future. It also wasn’t really long enough for the spider to crawl out of shot, so I had to manipulate it to create the illusion of it crawling off instead. Here is the animation:
This scene took me a very long time because of the many different elements involved, but I really think it was worth my time because it turned out even better than I imagined! I think the timing could be better with the first reaction but overall I’m really happy with the acting and the way the scene loops. I began to animate by following my reference footage but my timing charts became redundant quite quickly as I realised it was better to just use my intuition.
The puppet armature itself was very nice to animate with – it was easy to manipulate and nothing felt like it would break. The hands were a little bit stiff and weren’t quite doing what I wanted which I found more difficult. I also wasn’t able to do the blocking that I wanted to with him ducking under the table – I tried but the body just wasn’t supple enough to have him bend down. I think my solution of just having him lean back was effective enough though.
The animation of the face was very time consuming. I was taking a lot of time in-between frames to sculpt the expressions where I hadn’t pre-made them. This allowed me to get nice transitions between the expressions but it was quite inconvenient when animating. I think next time I should do a few versions of the same features so I have some that I can manipulate and some to replace them.
Something that was very inconvenient was the way the hat would move every time I touched the puppets head – which I was doing a lot in order to animate it. I had to match the hat to the previous shot almost every time I touched it – which was another unnecessary consumption of time. Gluing the hat down would have made things a lot easier.
The other inconvenience I had was with the wobbly table and camera set up. You can see the table is moving around in the shot but I think I just about got away with it after taking time to match the table up with the previous frame a lot of times. I also learned the importance of having a stable camera and being very careful so as not to knock it (which I did quite a few times!) which results in having to match up the shot again.
It was also quite a challenge to have 2 animations going on at the same time with the spider and character. There were times when I would get too focussed on the character and forget about the spider so the timing is a little off – but I wasn’t being too fussy since this wasn’t the main point of the assignment.
I have a little bit of knowledge in VFX so I put something together in After Effects for the purpose of the assignment – I do want to try and get a better composite done for my portfolio.
I really loved this exercise, it felt like my first piece of proper animation and I am really proud of what I did. I’m especially glad I took the extra time to make the animation loop because it makes it feel very complete. This was a very useful exercise because I made lots of mistakes and learned so much from it – I will feel more confident going into my next stop motion animation.