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.
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 20th 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.
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 20th 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 21st 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".
