FRINGE CINEMA ISSUE Nยบ1
Stop-Motion Animation THIS UNDERRATED ART FORM IS MAKING A COMEBACK
Aardman Animations P6
Social Media & Stop-Motion P8
Laika Studios P10
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Stop-Motion Animation ISSUE Nยบ1
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Hello & Welcome In this issue the fringe sector of cinema we will be discussing is stop-motion animation. One of the first things that a lot of people notice when discussing stop-motion animation is the fact that it seems to bring together a lot of the challenges of live action and 2D animation. Unlike traditional animation, in which about the only limit is what an artist can think to draw, stop-motion actually needs to be realized in a physical location. You need to be able to physically create whatever it is that you’re animating, which means that you’re still building a set, you’re still lighting every shot, and you’re still bound by the limitations of what you can do within your space. But on the other hand, you don’t get the ease of simply recording motion in real time – you still need to go fraction of a second by fraction of a second. Work that might take a few minutes to capture on a live-action set can eat up weeks of your time on a stop-motion one. A cynical person might feel inclined to say that stop-motion animation is just a collection of the most difficult parts of the other filmmaking disciplines. Why in the world would anyone subject themselves to this draconian method? Stop-motion has been around, in one-way or another, for pretty much all of the history of cinema. It’s been responsible for everything from visual effect showpieces and fantastic creatures to full lengthfeatures. Even though it’s never been the world’s most popular form of filmmaking, it’s always had an audience and avid followers. In recent years, thanks to the explosion of digital media and the proliferation of DIY indie animators, it’s actually become the center of one of the most popular underground and grassroots filmmaking scenes. Now more than ever, stop-motion is the film art form to watch. The main lesson that might be gleaned from all of this is that if the price that stop-motion animation pays is the hard work of two mediums (live-action and animation), the payoff it receives is the ability to create something that feels at least vaguely attached to both of them at the same time. The excruciatingly intricate and time-consuming process is what gives this art form its beauty and quirks. Sofia Estrada Ferry Editor
Aardman Animations:
MEET THE TEAM BEHIND SOME OF THE MOST ICONIC CHARACTERS EVER CREATED BY GARY EVANS
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eter Lord and David Sproxton founded Aardman Animations in 1972. Four years later, after moving to Bristol, UK, the pair created their first professional production. Its central character – a stop-motion, shape-shifting, gibberish-speaking plasticine man called Morph – would become an icon of children’s television for generations to come. Nick Park joined in 1985. The writer, director and animator created Wallace and Gromit, and Shaun the Sheep. Over the next two decades he earned six Oscar nominations, taking home four golden statuettes. In 1993, Park and his team completed The Wrong Trousers, Aardman’s first 30-minute story, one of the most successful animated films ever. It heralded a golden period for the studio: A Close Shave (Oscar winner), Wat’s Pig (another Oscar winner), Morph’s Files (a full TV series), Stage Fright (picked up a BAFTA), Rex The Runt (the studio’s first animated series for adults), Angry Kid (its first series released exclusively on the internet), and Flushed Away (the studio’s first CG film). They used live action, animation, paper craft, puppeteering; 2D and 3D and CGI and virtual reality. They saw hit after hit, innovation after innovation. But it was Chicken Run that really took things up a level. Directed by Lord and Park, and funded by DreamWorks, the studio’s first proper feature film came out in summer 2000. Reviews glowed. The box office banked over $220m. Chicken Run became the highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time – all of the studio’s stop-motion films are among the highest-grossing stop-motion films of all time. In total, Aardman films have earned almost a $1 billion worldwide. But films are just a small part of what the studio does. As well as films, TV shows and advertising campaigns, Aardman works on apps, games and websites. You can see Aardman characters in museums and exhibitions, in live shows and in theme parks around the world.
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Social Media & Stop-Motion:
RISE OF WOOL & FELT ANNA MANTZARIS @annamantzaris Anna Mantzaris is a Swedish Animation Director based in London. Her work is character driven and she loves to mix humor and melancholy, creating tactile stop-motion animation with an intricate and personal feel. Her characters are delicately realized capturing nuanced performances from tiny movements. She has worked on various projects, both commercial and feature films, such as Wes Anderson’s latest feature ‘Isle of Dogs’, amongst others. Her short films have won over 50 international awards, including European Animation Awards, Vimeo Best of the Year, and Walt Disney and Audience award at Ottawa.
LAWRENCE BECKER @samplertimes Lawrence Becker began experimenting with stop motion animation when he was 14 years old. Using a variety of mediums, from clay to paper and even felt, he creates dreamlike realities and magical animated scenes. Becker, the mixedmedia stop motion animator, is based in Portland, OR. He pitched, designed, and animated a campaign-themed video made of felt for Lizzo’s hit song “Truth Hurts.” He continues to animate videos for the biggest brands in the world.
ANDREA LOVE @andreaanimates Andrea Love is an independent animator and director based in Port Townsend, WA. A self-taught animator specializing in stop motion, she runs a full-service animation studio from her basement. From there, she does commercial work, as well as short documentary films and passion projects like “Cooking with Wool,” a sweet stop motion piece we found on Instagram. The piece features human fingers cooking in a tiny woolen kitchen, including an electric burner that turns from green to red when hot, and butter that melts in the pan. In short, Love animates wool.
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Instagram has a plethora of young stop-motion artists. One medium that is taking over the platform is felt and wool. This unconventional material allows for a fresh unique and perspective to the art form.
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BY TA S H A RO B I N S O N
Inside Laika Studios:
WHERE STOP-MOTION ANIMATION GOES HIGH TECH I’m standing between two boats — one intact, one cracked into two jagged halves. They’re each about the size of a conventional canoe, but they have masts, rumpled sails, tiny handrails around the edges, and little decks connected with miniature stairs. Both ships are spangled with bright orange, yellow, and red spots, but up close, the spots resolve into tiny autumn-leaf decals, meticulously applied to every surface in thick layers. These are two of the sets for Laika Studios’ new stopmotion film Kubo And The Two Strings, and when they appear in the film, they look immense: The Japanese child warrior Kubo and his animal companion Monkey leap and roll across those decks, fighting an enemy who hovers above them in midair, in the middle of a violent storm that rips leaves off the ships and tosses them around on surging waves. It’s a big scene. These are, comparatively, little boats. FRINGE CINEMA
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ut the detail on them is spectacular. Standing next to them, it’s easy to see how many hours of work went into constructing them to look like real sailing ships made of leaves, even through the lens of an ultra-high-def Canon 5D Mark III positioned inches away from the decks. Kubo’s production manager, Dan Pascall, says the most time-consuming part of making the ships isn’t even immediately evident: The design crew had to map every leaf — thousands of them, each individually laser-cut and about the size of a human thumbnail — and reproduce the exact same pattern on both ships, so they’d match from shot to shot within the film. It’s a lot of effort for something most people wouldn’t notice. “God knows,” Pascall sighs, “there are easier ways to make movies.” That refrain — “there are easier ways, but we challenge ourselves to take ultra-detailed, time-intensive routes instead” — came up repeatedly during my visit to Laika. From their Hillsboro, Oregon warehouse, just west of Portland and at a comfortable remove from Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Laika has positioned itself as a studio that has the time for those routes, and is scaled to afford the extra effort. Where other studios are increasingly moving to a make-or-break, blockbuster-only model, Laika’s roughly 400 employees, are quietly turning out a film every two or three years, making $60 million features that bring in around $100 million at the box office. Focus Features handles their distribution, and until this year, even their marketing has seemed home-grown, focusing on sizzle reels and modest, tasteful videos about how their hands-on aesthetic makes them stand out in a digital marketplace. “The ethos of this whole place is that we are artists first and foremost,” says CEO Travis Knight. “When we started Laika 10 years ago, we could see the writing on the wall. Stop-motion animation was basically taking its last, dying breath. We had to come up with a way, if we wanted to continue to make a living in this medium that we loved, to bring it into a new era, to invigorate it.”
It’s no wonder that Laika has few peers these days: in a film industry that favors quick turnaround and endless scalability, stop-motion is an inherently slow, difficult way to tell a story: It involves moving characters around on set by hand, shooting tiny movements individually, at a rate of 24 individual frames of action for each actual second. That’s particularly challenging with an expansive, epic fable like Kubo. The story features more than 70 separate sets, some complicated water effects, and a lot of fast-paced physical action. But Laika’s version of stop-motion is particularly striking because its characters and backdrops are rendered in such detail, and move so smoothly, that its films could be mistaken for wholly CGI creations, instead of stop-motion with digital assistance. And its processes are striking because they’re all built around the idea that technology has to service art rather than the other way around. If a director wants a particular visual effect, even if it’s never been done in animation before, it’s up to the fabricators and artists to figure out how to make it happen. The sets are fantastically detailed little worlds, built from foam, paint, wood, and resin, and designed to look seamless when assembled, but to pull apart easily so animators can access any point of them for a scene. According to Pascall, the art department had to build multiple sets for each animator who worked on Kubo. “The animators’ time is the most precious thing that we have,” he says. “So we need three sets for each of them — one they’re currently animating on, one ready and waiting for the next scene, and one that’s being prepped.” One of Laika’s ideals is that only one animator should work on a given scene at a time. “We don’t double up on animators per shot,” Pascall says. “We’ve tried it in the past, and it doesn’t work. They work at different paces, so it slows them down overall.” He says they sometimes shoot layers or characters separately, then composite them digitally, especially
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“WHEN WE STARTED LAIKA, STOPMOTION ANIMATION WAS TAKING ITS LAST, DYING BREATH.”
if the characters are far apart in a shot, and the depth of field would keep one of them out of focus for the camera. But for instance, in a scene where Kubo stands in a wooded area and a wind blows through the trees, that’s the work of a single animator moving every leaf and branch separately. The process is incredibly laborious: On Kubo, 27 animators worked simultaneously on their own scenes, each trying to achieve the company goal of 4.3 seconds of animation per week, and more often, only hitting about three seconds per week. And before they can even get started on a scene, other teams have spent many months assembling all the materials the animators are going to use. According to Puppet Fabrication Supervisor Georgina Hayns, an individual “hero puppet” can take four to nine months to design and build, so the fabrication team starts its work some 12 to 18 months before shooting on a project begins. Each shoot requires many copies of the same puppet, again so multiple animators can work simultaneously — there were 32 separate Kubo puppets on this shoot. Each puppet requires a complicated custom body, handmade clothing, and a rig that can hold the tens of thousands of 3D printed faces the animators swap in and out. (A quick sequence at the end of Laika’s ParaNorman shows a sped-up version of the complete puppet-fabrication process.) Because of the wear and tear on the
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puppets caused by constant handling, the fabrication department includes a maintenance team that re-tightens the puppets’ joints after every shot. And because the wires in the puppets’ fingers are so fine and fragile, each puppet requires a backup library of hands. “The fingers can break mid-shot,” Hayns says, so she has “one crazy little department” that just makes spare hands: “If we’ve got 140 puppets out there, we probably have 500 pairs of hands.” Each puppet also represents a lot of problem-solving, both for costumes and for particular character traits. On Kubo, one issue was how to give Kubo’s ally Monkey muscles that moved, and fur that could be fluffy, or matted, or soaked for individual scenes. “She was definitely the biggest challenge, because we had never made anything like her before,” Hayns says. “We built her an a completely different way, with a completely different approach, from the inside out. But she was a huge success as well.” Hayns’ team eventually built the character as a rigid armature with a “muscle suit” around it that could squash and stretch to suggest the body under the silicon-infused fur. Kubo’s costumes are similarly individually rigged in hidden layers, with latticeworks of wires and weights to let them hold consistent folds and wrinkles through months of handling. They’re the result of intensive research into traitional Japanese robes and Laika’s first experi-
ments with silk costumes, but they’re driven by engineering as much as traditional costuming. One new thing in the case of Kubo And The Two Strings is a greater reliance on CGI, especially to handle water effects and fill out crowd scenes. In a scene where the Kubo character tells a story to an admiring audience, most of the viewers are digital creations rather than physical ones. Laika doesn’t have a problem with digital assists: They’ve been necessary from the beginning, to erase the rigs that hold up the puppets, and the seams between the upper and lower face plates. Even Laika’s first feature, Coraline, had some computer-animated effects. “We’re not purists about stop motion,” Knight says. But he does prefer creative technological problem-solving over onesize-fits-all software solutions. “Within these walls, you have giant, throbbing, NASA-size brains that are inventing technologies, and then you have Luddites, people who are still working with their hands like artists and craftspeople were a century ago. I love that convergence of different types of methodologies and people. I think it creates a ground for innovation.” That innovation is going to continue to be necessary if Knight’s going to meet his next goal, of getting Laika to a onefeature-a-year release schedule. “It’s going to take some getting to,” Pascall says. “Right now, we’re at an 18-month turnaround, and that brings a lot of challenges. We’re doing three things at once: marketing on Kubo, shooting the next film, and pre-production on a third, and we’re doing it all with the same crew.” The studio is also expanding beyond its 150,000-foot confines into the building next door, which brings its own set of logistical headaches, especially with production currently underway. “Every department has to move. There have been lots of sleepless nights.” But there’s also huge incentive to expand, not just because the studio’s end products are so unique, but because of the hands-on, intensely cooperative process that creates them. Knight is enthusiastic about Laika’s future not because Kubo is perfect, but because it’s the end result of years of satisfying, fulfilling work. “The entire film is filled with all different kinds of imperfections and failings, and it’s always something you have to come to terms with,” he says. “Sometimes it’s maddening to work in this medium, because of the imperfections. But that’s one of the things that makes it inherently beautiful. We really embrace that side of it, because it makes these films human.”
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“I LOVE THAT CONVERGENCE OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF METHODOLOGIES AND PEOPLE. I THINK IT CREATES A GROUND FOR INNOVATION.”
Cult Classics ISSUE Nยบ2
Director Nathan Ferry Editor Sofia Estrada Ferry
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COMING SUMMER 2020
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