Clarence Rajaratnam: Replicating Creature Stop-motion in Maya

4. The need to incorporate CG into traditional Creature and Character based 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.