Clarence Rajaratnam: Creating old-school Creature stop motion animation in Maya

CONTENT:

1. Introduction

2. Abstract

3. Creature stop-motion History

4. Why incorporate stop-motion in CG when there is traditional stop-motion

5. Previous Projects at NCCA that resembled CG stop-motion

6. Stop-motion Animation Progress in MAYA

6.1 Model & Rig of the Dinosaur
6.2 First scene including Stop-motion in Maya

6.3 Taking note on what makes an animation look Stop-motion

6.4 Bringing out more of a stop-motion look

6.5 Integration of Stop-motion animation from Maya onto live background image

6.6 Extra Work apart from animation

7. Conclusion

1. Introduction

Stop motion as we all come to know, is the forerunner of modern day High-end Computer Generated Animation. It gives the illusion that an object or figure to be moving, when each frame that was taken, contains the object still in motion. Creature based stop-motion dominated the 20^th century Hollywood industry, ranging from movies like Lost-world (1925), King Kong (1933), Jason and the Argonauts (1963) to Ghostbusters (1984) and RoboCop (1987). Stop motion itself has many different categories such as Claymation, Puppet animation, Cutout animation, Go motion, etc. Of the above mentioned techniques, Creature stop-motion is more focused on Claymation, Puppet animation and Go motion. In the present day computer generated animation provides the cutting edge when attempting to produce creature or any other form of industry standard animations. Certain studios across Europe (Meindbender studios and Aardman Animation studios) are attempting to make successful inroads into achieving the look and feel of Stop motion animation with the fluidity and complexity of high end computer based animation. But in these types of cases, they nail down the visual aspects of the characters down to the wire, but the animation retains the movement of traditional computer animation by appearing to be fluid instead of being jarring and be a bit rough around the edges.

2. Abstract

For this report I will be briefly detailing about the evolution of creature stop motion animation till the present day, and also the veterans and enthusiasts who have reshaped this industry into its current form. As for my project I approached the task of recreating the aesthetic of traditional stop motion animation through the means of computer based animation utilising different procedures. Initially, most of the procedures I ventured into did not yield the trademark jerky animation usually associated with stop motion. I have additionally researched on previous projects by previous students of NCCA who have been inspired by old-school stop motion movies and attempted creating some form of animation in Maya to resemble stop-motion. For my project it was more practical re-tries then research on achieving the final desired product, but after several attempts I was finally able to get the techniques working in order.

3. Creature stop-motion History

Initially I would like to inform about the veterans and innovators who not only pioneered stop motion, but also laid the cornerstone for modern day Creature FX which influenced the modern day giants of filmmaking, the likes of Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, Tim Burton and Co.

British born pioneer “James Stuart Blackton” was the very first to introduce stop-motion animation.

James Stuart Blackton

His short was called The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1898) which included animated wooden toy animals borrowed from Blackton's daughter. This coincided with the unearthing of fossilised skeletons across the world where people initially believed them to belong to dragons, only to be corrected to be giant prehistoric reptiles known as Dinosaurs. Gertie the Dinosaur (1914- by Winsor McCay) was an animated short and also was the first piece of film to introduce dinosaurs into the motion picture industry.

Animator Winsor McCay interacted with an on-screen dinosaur, Gertie, projected behind him on the stage. McCay and Gertie inspired an entire generation of animators. Not until the collaborative projects of Disney Studios in the 1930s was McCay's artistry rivaled in such films as Snow White. — Source: The Gertie Project

Animator Winsor McCay, whose work influenced the greats of the 1930s and 1940s, including Walt Disney and Walter Lantz.

This documentary clearly shows how creature stop-motion started as slapstick comedy.

Willis O'Brien also included dinosaurs into stop-motion animation in the film

Dinosaur and the missing link (1914), where he emphasises “Slapstick comedy” to all the characters in it. Both Gertie the Dinosaur and the Missing link showed more comical nature to the characters and as said before, included more “Slapstick comedy”.

O'Bie working on a model for The Lost World.

O'Brien working on Kong

It wasn’t until “World War 1”, that several reforms were reinforced into the factions shaping stop motion animation. “Willis O'Brien” now showed a more aggressive nature to his characters in the movie Ghost of Slumber mountain (1918), where Dinosaurs fought for survival similar to that of wild animals in nature. This movie visually produced a haunting appearance to its audiences, as the Dinosaurs were savage and living in a complete uncivilised world, and as for the clumsy comical slapstick feel, it was long gone.

Similar to this style, Willis O'Brien later introduced Lost World (1925), where the puppets were rigged of metal armatures and covered with stuffing and foam rubber in contrast to the puppets from “Missing link” which were made of augmented clay. With metal armatures the puppets tend to look more realistic because of the weight and the movement of the dinosaurs. As for the visual side Charles R. Knight envisioned the look of Dinosaurs as if he travelled through time and had a glance of these prehistoric creatures. On the animation side Willis O'Brien did a remarkable job by adding fine details of how real animals behaved in the wild. For example in the part where a dinosaur called Agathaumas seen in battle with a “Tyrannosaurus Rex”, there was a pause between the two dinosaurs after their first confrontation. This is similar to real wild life footage (a pack of hyenas fighting each other would suddenly pause to assess the opponents next move). When King Kong (1933) was released it became the most renowned work of Willis O'Brien, as he focused more on Kong, giving both an aggressive and soft sided nature.

Charles R. Knight working on Stegosaurus in 1899.

Some of the dinosaurs from Lost World (1925) including the battle between “Tyrannosaurus Rex” and "Agathaumas" (2:34 - 3:16).

Kong armature.

another rig for one of the creatures from King Kong (1933)

“The stop-motion models are also at their best, and in this film, they actually interact almost completely convincingly with the human actors... In Creation, the interactive scenes were but a test for this, and in The Lost World, there never was any real interaction. King Kong is as much a triumph of art and filmmaking as it is a ripping good yarn of 1930's adventure cinema “ [lost world website].

Unlike Willis O'Brien his predecessor Ray Harryhausen worked on animated shorts for children such as “Mother goose stories” and “Fairy tales” and later extended his courier on Creature flicks. Ray Harryhausen was unique as he animated on different types of creatures ranging from quadrupeds, bipeds, multipeds to birds and even flying saucers. He was the master of creature stop-motion and the main influence for me to approach this project. On a personal note, the best stop motion characters he had ever conceived were the group of skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts and the mythical beast the Medusa. Medusa especially, since the character itself was composed of several different components (e.g. snakes, Medusa, tail) and each component appears to have a life of its own and acts according to the scenario.

Characters from "Mother Goose stories".

Medusa and the skeleton from Jason and the Argonauts

In a video featuring John Landis & Ray Harryhausen (for winning the Bradford animation festival award for lifetime achievement), Ray talks about Talos from the film Jason and the Argonauts where he incorporated jerky animation to the creature since it doesn't appear to be made of flesh and bones. As for the movement, the creature’s legs drop down quicker (showing the heaviness), and the upper body along with the arms sway around sluggishly. At the time, he was still criticised for the jerky nature of the animation and the metal creak noise Talos made. But in the present, his efforts have made him a revered being among the pantheon of animation masters.

Interview featuring John Landis & Ray Harryhausen for the Bradford animation festival award.

Ray Harryhausen once said “The snow ball rolls on”. Meaning that Ray was inspired by O'Brien and then later came Phil Tippet who was inspired by Ray. Phil tippet bridged the gap between SFX (special effects) and VFX (visual effects) by introducing “Go-motion”. There is a scene in Star Wars Episode five: Empire strikes back (1980) where Tippet designed and animated the creature called TaunTaun which holds an important place in stop-motion history. Because the TaunTauns had to move quickly, Phill wanted to replicate “Motionblur” which is normally attributed to live action scenes involving fast moving objects. When compared with traditional stop motion, each shot was taken with the figure being “still in motion”, thus the overall footage consists the figure with fine edges resulting in a strobing characteristic stop-motion effect. For the Tauntaun shots the puppet was moved along a motion controlled track with each opening of the camera shutter. This first use of motion blur with stop motion animation, involved only the forward momentum of the puppet's body. In Tippet's next film Dragon slayer (1981) a complex motion controlled system was used to add motion blur to all the puppets movement, the process was so successful it gave rise to a new term, “Go-motion”.

Hatches are used to pop in and animate the "AT-AT's" from The Empire Strikes Back.

Phil sets up a shot for the TaunTaun sequence.

Go-motion test for T-Rex in Jurassic Park.

There is a subtle difference between the techniques used in Empire strikes back and Dragon slayer. For the Tauntaun's motion it was achieved entirely with practical, frame-by-frame manipulation of physical models, and optically composited into miniature and live action settings, while for Dragon slayer (1981), which gave Tippet his first Oscar nomination and showcased the computer-assisted stop-motion technique 'Go-motion' (technology that enabled computerized rod puppets to be moved mechanically, then manipulated by hand in-between frames). Developed for animating Tauntauns and used throughout the 1980s, the process allowed animators to manipulate puppets via servo-driven rods, producing frame by frame motionblur that eliminated the strobing of traditional stop-motion. With traditional stop motion, artists tend to make up there key-frames as they went along animating, but with Go-motion artists would have to pre-visualise everything which was very convoluted. [article from phil tippet]

Then came Jurassic Park (1993) which opened a new gateway to the FX industry and almost made Tippet and his crew go “extinct”. But luckily in the end Spielberg still required Tippet’s expert animation skills. Steven Spielberg was about to greenlight Go-motion, when the Industrial Light and Magic crew came with an alternative approach. The same Go-motion approach was used, but only this time the animators were using a dinosaur input device (essentially an armature hooked up to a workstation) and animating the wires connected to the puppet. Even though this movie was revolutionary for it's ground breaking visual effects, it couldn't have been possible without Phil tippet and his Go-motion crew who did a splendid job on the animation side.

This documentary video clearly shows how Stop-motion (& Go-motion) gave rise to CG animation.

4. Why incorporate stop-motion in CG when there is traditional stop-motion

First why I took the path on making it in Maya is because I have a bit of experience with Maya software for computer animation, and have no experience on physically creating maquettes or armatures. Since I have some knowledge on biped and quadruped animation in Maya, I wanted to push my boundary on animation a bit further, but with a different take, and stop-motion was the first thing that popped in my mind. I have seen so many shorts done in traditional stop-motion methods and some that are computer generated that is only intended to look stop-motion visually and not motion wise.

”However as the millennium came and went the genre of mixing live action and stop motion animation in major film releases gave way to CGI. There are still however many examples of live action and stop motion animation used in short movies, documentaries and commercials such as the Sony Bravia Commercial with animated bunnies running throughout New York. Or the Sony PSP commercial which featured objects in animation and live action rather than character or puppet animation. Its notable also that the preferred medium seems now to move towards object animation rather than the more time consuming character animation of what is now the last century.”

On doing stop-motion I am more interested on creature stop-motion as it allows the animator to think and approach on different ways, but also must convince the viewer as if this creature is to be walking this earth, this is how it moves and acts. In the movie The Animal World

(1956) there is a scene where a Triceraptos dinosaur confronts a Tyrannosaurus Rex; and in that shot when the Triceraptos tries to charge it kind of resembles Bullfighting, so I guess it is always better to coincide the animation of a creature to animals in real world.

Stop-motion movies like Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the were Rabbit (2005), Coraline (2009) have assisted digital imagery from computers. “WALLACE AND GROMIT does make use of the latest advances in computer wizardry (contrary to popular belief, there is a heavy preponderance of CG used in this film – approximately 700 shots contain some computer tinkering). Yet, that statistic should not dissuade

you from looking at the real meat n' potatoes of this film, which is the gloriously realized characters captured in laborious clay stop-motion animation. And, to the filmmaker's credit, the CGI used in this film does not take away from the odd beauty of the clay set pieces – they instead augmented and compliment visuals and provide sights that would have been next-to-impossible to create with rudimentary clay puppets”.

But in the movie Coraline (2009) a different approach was chosen. It used replacement animation where the puppet’s face was constantly swapped for another different expression with the needed smile. This operandi is not new but was a bit rough since the desirable hand made look did not yield all the in-betweens the Director wanted. However, sculpting those thousands of expressions by hand would have taken years to complete. To keep the budget and timeline intact while creating stop-motion animation so smooth you could read Coraline’s lips, production studio Laika constructed blend shape CG face models that were output through rapid prototyping (RP) with 3 Connex500 3D printers from Objet Geometries. This proved vital in creating characters, props and more importantly the thousands of intricate models required for smooth face shape replacement. CG was also used extensively for rig and seam removal.

Production companies in the 21^st century strongly emphasise on time and profit, therefore stop-motion industries try to incorporate the aid of computers to produce better results and also most importantly to finish the product on time.

Thousands of 3D ‘Printed’ Face Shapes Were Produced For Coraline.

Head Awaiting The Interchangeable Face Shapes.


Example of Rapid Prototyping On A Connex500 3D Printer by Objet.

Creating facial expressions using a 3D software.

5. Previous Projects at NCCA that resembled CG stop-motion

I went through a couple of reports done by previous students of the ncca who were inspired by old stop-motion movies. The reason to browse through these reports was to produce my own unique perspective on a genre of animation that has been around for decades, as well differentiate from the rather technical attempts put forward by the previous students. The first report called "Working with Ray" was not primarily focused on stop-motion but rather on human movement, gesture, body language and in a broad sense about what it means to be an animator. The report dwelled about the ability to create characters, to make them live and to make them laugh, which was a rather interesting read but dwelled very little on stop-motion or its replication through computer animation.

The other report called "stop-motion simulation" was a bit intriguing as it involved creating a "Mel" script which automatically modified the animation curves to stepped and randomised to produce jerky animation. The designer went around creating usual computer animation with flatten tangents in the graph editor, then using his Mel script which keyed every 2nd frame and made all the keys "stepped". He then produced another script that took all the key frames and randomised them with a control variable to choose how much jerky movements should be included in the animation. The abovementioned project was rather technical as it involved pressing buttons and tweaking codes to make the animation appear jerky. But I felt did not produce the key aspects of traditional stop-motion animation which is to play according to an animator’s artistic vision and strength. A "Mel" script called "Jitter bug" (downloaded) which I used for my project at one point, produced similar results according to this project, but did not produce necessary satisfying results fir Stop-motion. I will be describing more about the script later.

Graphical representation of the Stickfas toy which was used in the project "stop-motion simulation".

6. Stop-motion Animation Progress in MAYA

6.1 Model & Rig of the Dinosaur

Since I was focusing more on animation as the end product for my project, I didn’t want to dwell on modeling the character as there was lack of time. Instead I scoured the web for a decent dinosaur rig and came across one on the site Creative Crash (also known as High-end 3D). To my luck the rig was free and it was that of a dinosaur known as an Albertosaurus which shared certain anatomical features similar to a Tyrannosaurus Rex . The rig was constructed by Harry Gladwin-Geoghegan and the model created by Timur Mehmat. The model contained decent normal, specular and diffuse maps for the body and eyes while the rig contained the following:

- Proxy/Low Res/High Res switch
- FK overrides on the Auto Toe Flop
- FK and Automatic Tail Rigs
- Nostril Flares/Blinks

Control set-ups for the rig.

6.2 First scene including Stop-motion in Maya

I wanted to try and incorporate stop-motion and traditional computer animation together by showing a form of interaction between two characters. To achieve this I had to download another rig known as PjlHogan from a website called Mothermushroom. The model looked similar to a rudimentary robot. I then approached this scene by including some slap-stick comedy. In this particular scene the dinosaur approaches the robot character from behind unnoticed and scares it. As a result the robot is startled and stumbles. Timing became the primary issue to be resolved for this particular clip. I researched the web to find out how traditional stop-motion timing worked and came across these rudimentary guidelines.

Calculate the total running time of the stop motion animation scene you want to create. For the example, say the scene will be 3 minutes in length.
Convert the scene length to seconds by multiplying the minutes by 60. For this example, 3 minutes = 3 x 60 = 180 second.
Use a standard frame rate of 24 frames per second (fps). This is the traditional standard for stop motion animation. Calculate the total frames needed:
180 seconds x 24 fps = 4320 frames
No one said creating stop motion animation would be fast or easy.
Keep the flow of the motion consistent by setting some intermediate key-frames. Key-frames are important images in the animation sequence that help control story and timing. Stop motion animation, unlike hand drawn animation, typically lends itself better to frame to frame creation. The key-frame shots cannot be taken first, and the in-between shots taken later, although it may be possible with very careful arrangement and additional work when processing.
Break the animation segments into smaller animation scenes. For the 3 minute movie example, break out the sequence scene by scene to follow the storyline. If a 10 second scene is needed animating two object colliding together, there might be 3 key-frames:

This 10 second stop motion clip would require 10 x 24 = 240 frames. To keep the scene timing smooth try keeping the key-frames about the same amount of frames apart. In this case, the key-frames would be about 60 frames apart. This is a much more manageable reference to use when moving object to get photographs. Animate the entire stop motion sequence to video.

Even though the above-mentioned instructions are quite useful for creating traditional stop-motion it was not recommended for what I was going to produce, hence I had to approach it in a different direction. When trying to keep keyed frames, every frame produces a smooth flow that finally ends up looking like traditional computer animation. The major drawback with this pathway was, since the animation itself was going to be computer generated the viewer will be able to identify and conceive that the end product is CG animation rather than Stop-motion.

Therefore I started looking for any clues on how to produce simple homemade stop-motion animations (for example Lego, clay stop-motion which are easily produced by many different people including kids in schools who are not even professionals in stop-motion) primarily because it has that easily conceived factor that its stop-motion. In one certain forum they mentioned that they used twelve keyed frames every second while in another CG forum (from Creative Cow) it mentioned that by changing the key-frames in Maya to "Stepped" rather than "besier", "linear" or other "ease-in/ease=out" key-frame types will produce that desired stop-motion effect.

Later I jumped into Maya and changed the Tangents → Default out tangent from Clamped (default setting) to Stepped in the Animation preferences in Maya. I started adding keys every twos thus making twelve keys per second. With Stepped the movement of each control does not show until the time slider reaches a key, as a result kind of shows that one frame pause which there is no key. On my first try I was concentrating more on the animation graph editor, trying to match every key to produce arcs and bends, similar to how it looks in traditional computer animations.

After animating the dinosaur to 260 frames, I then recognized that the dinosaur was showing some offset (motion wise) compared to the usual animation of the robot, but was not showing the desired stop-motion characteristic. The reason on why it was appearing smooth was because I went around animating the dinosaur in accordance with traditional computer animation using key-frames and the graph editor. For example, adding key-frames to a leg for the start and end poses then doing the in-betweens was one reason why the animation didn’t yield the desired result. The above-mentioned methods proved catastrophic and I had to go back to the drawing board to redesign the entire scene as well as try and correct the flaw.

My next attempt was to obtain a script which could modify the animation that I had already created to make it appear jerky. I found a Mel script called Jitter Bug 2.5.0 which added non-destructive controllable random jitter to keyed objects based on user settings. Using this script it was possible to remove the jitter or swap it with the original animation curve at any time. There were many options included in the script that enabled random or non-random offset and drop-off. There was also a mode that simulated a stop motion feel by basing the amount of random jitter on the speed of the object or control. To yield the proper results I simply had to select the keys that I wanted to jitter and run the code. This resulted in a GUI popping up which contained a graph editor. Initially the controls in the GUI were formidable and confounding. Nevertheless I gave it a try, and even though it produced the jerky animation I was aiming for, it also did produce some awkward movements on certain instances (when the dinosaur was stationary) since it was randomizing each key to different extents.

Graph editor showing the "Stepped" curves, The curves look similar to "Clamped" thus producing smooth animation.

First attempt on creating stop-motion in Maya. You can see some difference in the motion between the Dinosaur (bit slower) and the Robot.

"Jitter Bug" GUI from my project.

"Jitter Bug" GUI (from the website), as you can see the modification the script makes to smooth curves.


Top : Previous graph for the "Torso" control, Bottom : After using the "Jitter Bug" mel script. Key frames are added every two frames also randomizing the offset.

The use of "Jitter Bug" gave a weird constant vibration to the animation.

6.3 Taking note on what makes an animation look Stop-motion

Stop-motion or "model" animation, which includes clay animation, strikes a cord in the human psyche with strong physical identification. Here is a form of animation that has the ability of all other forms of animation. It can tell stories through character, conflict and resolve, and visual interest satisfying the audience's psychological identification needs. Yet it relies on photography to reveal physical reality. The added benefit is that there is something very fundamental about the physical reality of actual models, puppets, lighting and imperfection that we can identify and understand as humans. This imperfection is in fabrication and animated movement. Successful stop-motion films celebrate their imperfections. For example, there is a joy in seeing the fingerprints of the artist in a clay animated film. When computer animation incorporates the imperfections of movement and physical flaws that are inherent in model animation, then it can successfully touch its audience. This imperfection is what we are as human beings. We are made of infinite textures. We understand that there is no perfect symmetry in our lives. We all have "flaws" and we struggle to work with what we have as humans. Animation can take us away from these imperfections of our world. It can allow us to escape our reality and inspire us but we can never ultimately deny our human nature. This is the strength and advantage of physical stop-motion animation. Through new technology such as advance fabrication materials like silicone, "frame grabbers", digital cameras and composite layering , stop motion has the ability to strive for more perfect movement and fabrication but it can never ultimately deny its real physical qualities and limitations. It is very much like us as humans. We strive for higher goals and fantasy often reaching quite high but we are always working in this real and physical world.

Traditional Stop-motion easily portrays to a viewer that it is Stop-motion due to the fact it shows that imperfection feel to the animation. As I mentioned before, Ray Harryhausen's addition of jerky stop-motion on Talos (Jason and the Argonauts (1963)) made it look more bizarre and in some instances unique. Through Talos, Ray showed that quintessential feeling of stop-motion on bringing lifeless objects to life and showing more of a fantasy essence.

From 3:00 you can see the awakening of "Talos", which clearly demonstrates "Jerky Stop-motion".

6.4 Bringing out more of a stop-motion look

On my second attempt I approached the animation in accordance to traditional stop-motion where for instance each part of the figure is moved, the whole pose made and then finally the image frame is taken. The only complication with this procedure is that in traditional stop-motion animation the artist tends to see everything according to the eye perspective which is wide and freely operated but when using an animation software such as Maya our eyes tend to be restricted on accordance to the view-port through which the operator is using to view an object.

For this attempt I decided to scrub the dinosaur-robot slapstick comedy scene away and attempted to construct a damsel in distress scenario influenced by the early landmark stop-motion sequence found in Kingkong (1930). To achieve this I downloaded a woman rig (from creative crash) and animated her (not stop-motion) being chased by the carnivorous Dinosaur. The woman rig is called “Alice” and is created by “Joel Anderson”, I added the camouflage cap and the top for the woman to suite her for the jungle scenario .

The camera had to be moved around to identify which part of the Dinosaur model the control rig was moving. But due to these restrains if I had started posing all of the controls and keying it each frame it would have ended up being a very vigorous process. To overcome this I had to focus away from the Animation graph editor (because in traditional stop-motion it's about the poses along with "on the go" type animation) and concentrate on how each and every pose coincided properly with the next frame pose.

I then set about adding some key-frames for the foot controls of the Dinosaur. For example the right foot is at the rear on frame two, and then moves to the front at frame sixteen giving fourteen frames offset (accordance to traditional computer animation). Because this eases out the position where each foot is going to move, and as a result, becomes more manageable on where the whole body is going to end up for that end key-frame. Next I started keying each foot position in twos. Now the feet started to move. Since these controls are not parented to the torso control, the whole body (except the feet along with the knees) does not move. To counter this I started moving the torso control (which is the parent control for all the other controls except the global and feet controls) along the Z-axis and keying it along every “two” frames so that I end up at a position which relates according to the position of the feet.

Now that the whole body moves along with the feet, I started to animate the other controls. For example the head on every two, but still not tweaking the other attributes of the torso control (apart from z-axis movement). I found out it was best to animate this control (torso control) later, because when tweaked it contributed to the movement of the whole body (since it’s the parent control) thus becoming more excessive and confusing on animating the other controls.

It was better to animate the tail after the torso was done, as the torso contributed to the direction in which the tail rotated and swayed. Once the second attempt was done it gave a much better result and was looking akin to stop motion. At this point the animation was retaining the trademark jerky movement associated with traditional stop-motion. Therefore I wanted to add some fluid continuity (for, e.g. the head control) as it was showing more jerky characteristics. I also wanted to produce two versions of this animation, one showing a bit more smooth aesthetic while the other showing more jerky movements.

Even-though when I was done with the second attempt I still had some problems with certain controls. For instance, the head and tail were not showing the desired movement in certain frames. To overcome this I fixed some keyed frames to match up with the previous and later keyed frames.

After producing a better result in the movement to appear akin to stop-motion I then attempted to figure out how to incorporate more strobing (jerky) movements and feel to the animation. This was relatively simple as I randomly deleted some keyed frames of different controls in different places of the timeline as well as increased and decreased some of the attribute values of the controls to show some exceeded limit (this brought up the weird “popness” on certain parts of the body during the movement).

Later I rendered the models with Maya “physical sun and sky”, downloaded a jungle background concept art (as there wasn’t enough time to create one), added the ground onto the concept art image using Photo-shop and finally compositing it all along with the modified background using Nuke.

Now it's looking much better than the previous attempt (still not jerky enough) , thou I think it's wrong to show a smooth tracking shot for the animation ( it doesn't feel stop-motion).

The same animation from previous footage, but composited on a painted background.

This is the more jerky version of the previous animation.

Graph showing more offset on amplitude thus giving more jerkiness.

6.5 Integration of Stop-motion animation from Maya onto live background image

Since I finally found the understanding to replicate traditional stop-motion in Maya, I wanted to try another go at it using the exact strategies and scenarios used for the damsel in distress animation piece. For this new scene I animated the dinosaur attempting to munch off a carcass. But this time I wanted to composite the dinosaur onto a live background. I portrayed it to appear similar to that of a stop-motion animated dinosaur toy on a live action background. After the animation was complete, I did some different render passes, took it to Nuke and composited it over the live background.

Finally blending the animation on live background image.

6.6 Extra Work apart from animation

For my damsel in distress animation piece I rendered the dinosaur and the woman model on Maya Physical Sun & Sky background to produce even lighting around both characters. I then extracted the silhouettes of both characters with the pre-multiply node from Nuke and blended them in accordance to the background image.

For my second animation I took a still live background image to be used for the composition. The dinosaur underwent several passes such as Diffuse, Ambient occlusion, Reflection, Specular, Rim-light and Shadow. Finally the composition was tweaked to blend it with the background.

Original image is pre-multiplied and colour corrected to just extract the characters.

Painted the ground on the original Background.

Render passes (from left to right) - diffuse, ambient, reflection, specular, rim-light, shadow.

7. Conclusion

I learned a lot from the errors and mistakes I made when animating the rig. Fortunately I was able to rectify these mistakes by following certain guidelines as well reinventing my own which I believe helped me produce animations which bore the visual feel and movement normally found on traditional stop-motion animations. I yearn to further increase this aspect and style of animation by integrating real actors being chased by a stop-motion dinosaur on a live action background to depict the scenes and movies constructed by Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen, or even incorporating my sequence of animations to the clips generated by the great man Harryhausen himself. Another pathway would be to incorporate two characters of which one is animated using the style and strategies illustrated above while the other is animated using traditional stop-motion and integrate them onto a live action background where the viewer would not be able to differentiate between the computer generated animation and the stop-motion sequence.

8. References

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Stop Motion Works., 2005. Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection. [Online] (Updated January) Avaiable at: http://www.stopmotionworks.com/articles/rhearlyrs.htm [Accessed ].
Harryhausen , R., 2009. Ray Harryhausen | The Official Website. [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.rayharryhausen.com/pre-dynamation.php [Accessed ].
Koban , C. J., . WALLACE AND GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.craigerscinemacorner.com/Reviews/wallace_and_gromit_the_curse_of_the_were_rabbit.htm [Accessed ].
eHow., . How to Calculate Stop Motion Animation Timing. [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.ehow.com/how_5830552_calculate-stop-motion-animation-timing.html [Accessed ].

Videos

McClure, D., . Hollywood Dinosaur Chronicles. [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNatGDTb0iY&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ].
rogerkify, . ., . DINOSAURS from "THE LOST WORLD" . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLVt6bMJ8Ds&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ].
nationalmediamuseum, . ., . John Landis & Ray Harryhausen in conversation . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRv5jqu8QMM&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ].
Universal Pictures., . Advanced Stop Motion test for Jurassic Park . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEK9mitagS8&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ].
ILM, . ., . ILM Development of CGI 1980s - 1990s . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miVlDKGa8F4&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ].
FocusFeatures, . ., . "Coraline" - The Biggest Smallest Movie . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cayVMHSRHZI&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ].
FocusFeatures, . ., . Coraline - Making Faces . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oVF3-7zvP0&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ].
Morningside Productions and Columbia Pictures., . The Awakening of Talos - Jason & The Argonauts (1963). [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q17dl_aUNf4&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ].

Reports and Articles

CINEFX., 2004. CINEFX 97. : CINEFX.
Huffman, B., 2002. Working with Ray. . Bournemouth: NCCA.
Niman, J., . Stop-motion Simulation. . Bournemouth: NCCA.

Images

Canemaker , J., 2005. Winsor McCay : His Life and Art . : Harry N Abrams Inc.
Judd, T., 2008. Spring Lake Heritage Festival to honor animation pioneer Winsor McCay. [Online] (Updated 2008) Avaiable at: http://blog.mlive.com/chronicle/2008/05
Bradford., 2010. Harryhausen Pledges Life's Work to National Media Museum . [Online] Avaiable at: http://visitbradford.blogspot.com/2010/06/harryhausen-pledges-lifes-work-to.html [Accessed ].
Brownlee, J., 2006. Table Of Malcontents Just another WordPress weblog The Complete Ray Harryhausen Creature List. [Online] Avaiable at: file:///home/g9075218/images%20references/The%20Complete%20Ray%20Harryhausen%20Creature%20List%20|%20Table%20Of%20Malcontents.html [Accessed ].
starwarsinterviews., 2010. Phil Tippett interview | Stop Motion Animator | Star Wars . [Online] Avaiable at: http://starwarsinterviews1.blogspot.com/search/label/Stop%20Motion%20Animator [Accessed ].
RKO/Turner Broadcasting., . King Kong and Son of Kong, 1933. [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.sdnhm.org/exhibits/dinosrr/movie_posters.html [Accessed ].

Clarence Rajaratnam

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Tuesday 1 March 2011

Creating old-school Creature stop motion animation in Maya

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