replacement stop-motion animating

So . . . I haven't worked on my animation for a few weeks . . . you can watch my latest video diary to see what's been going on in my life  . . being self-employed is hard, to continue to remain motivated day after day means working hard on maintaining your self-esteem, and this can be easily destroyed in many ways - reading what critics think of your work, for example, can be really stupid and pointless, but I always end up doing it . . . it's pointless to be hurt by the opinions of someone that has turned up for 45 minutes, taken one glance at what you've been working on for maybe 9 or 10 months, and not bothered to engage any further with the rest of your work or even try to begin to understand what you are doing, they don't ask any questions, or discuss your work within any interesting context . . . it'd be like me judging their lives just based on their little byline photographs (which, of course, I do)  . . . but yet I can't wait to read these things, and I get upset every time.  Critics never really like my work, never, and although I basically understand this is ultimately a good thing I still get upset for a few days (or weeks) and imagine how I can avenge myself.   Hmm.  So it's been an un-healthily mental few weeks.  Then I remembered my own advice about how just getting on with your work is GOOD FOR YOU, and I started to get on with animating again and went for one of the more complicated scenes.  And this week has gone by very fast and I haven't seen any daylight.  I only left the house to see John Prine last night, one of the most life-affirming people I have ever spent time in the presence of, he sings and you realise nothing else matters apart from getting on with what you want to do.  Check him out if you already haven't by now.  

This is scene where Peter gives Lily a little present he's made for her, a clockwork motorbike with the two of them riding about happily on its back.  I've always been inspired by automate makers like Paul Spooner and Tim Hunkin (you might have seen their work at the Science Museum, the Eden Project, London Zoo, Southwold Pier or at Cabaret Mechanical Theatre exhibitions) and this is a way for me to pay tribute to their influence (in an oblique way, as they don't make clockwork toys that run around the table . . . )

To achieve a convincing clockwork key-turning effect within this 2D cardboard world I have been using a system of replacement cut-out pieces, photographing them in a sequence, to make it look like the key is turning in the machine as it rides around.  I could have just cut out the key 7 or 8 times in different positions and swap them over one at a time on the same bike as it moved around, but to look like it was really anchored in the bike toy it was better and more convincing to also cut out a new bike for each position of the key turning.  This had the benefit of the motorbike looking slightly more charmingly home-made (as if by Peter) as little imperfections and difference occur each time I cut the bike out and get played out as it is animated.  

I made 7 bikes to complete the winding key cycle:

and then I tested it and it didn't work.   

And also I noticed that I hadn't even properly finished cutting out all then pieces even, I hadn't cut out all the mouths and so looked like they were gulping a bit weirdly.  

When I cut out the keys I thought I had observed the real-life key turning really accurately, from this guy:

but it just was all wrong.  This is the thing about films and animation - if it doesn't look right it just isn't right, you can't deceive yourself that it'll look fine once all the other fancy stuff has been added, it won't.  So I had another look at the robot (actually is it a martian?) and cut it all out AGAIN.  This time it worked . . . 

You can check out my video diary below, it's quite a long one, and I've got a little more to say about this  week's work, I've been building up the physical layers of the animation to create the room settings and furniture so I'll continue writing this later to show you some of that. Meanwhile, thanks a lot for reading.    

the little match girl passion: shadow world

The central figure in this story is obviously the match girl herself, and this means the way everything else is described visually has to lead out of the way she is made.  I use shadow puppets to portray her in this, and so other parts of the story either go forward from this - her visions for example are "extra" real in that they are 3D painted models, so they feel hyper-real to her, a cardboard girl, and then other people - the anonymous crowds in the city - are smudgey chalk animated loops, they have no individual character, no discernible strength or edges, but rather are lumps of storytelling devices, I imagined Carol by Patricia Highsmith when I was thinking of the crowd scenes, 1930s or 40s busy wintery crowds getting on with stuff in the city, and nothing to do with us or the story we are here to listen to, well, except to judge, maybe, as this is a Passion.  

In earlier shows I have projected the shadow puppets and backgrounds simultaneously from an O.H.P. onto a screen, but here, as my processes have developed over the last couple of years, I am creating a much more layered piece, building up cut-out painted skyscrapers, the chalk animations, little models with lights and holes and clear coloured plastic - I perform the black cut-out cardboard shadow puppets in front of the camera, or sometimes behind a paper screen, like they did in the olden days . . . and it's still basically light and shadows, and here this means that a lot of the main puppet figures of the match girl are almost little cardboard automata - like two of my favourite artists Paul Spooner and Tim Hunkin - with one or two little functions to each perform to tell a specific piece of the story. 

I made a video that explains a bit more of this and shows you some of the puppets actually moving . . . 

unicorn theatre christmas card

in between finishing off the puppets and animations for The Little Match Girl Passion next week at Spitalfields Winter Music Festival I painted a Christmas card for the Unicorn Theatre in Southwark . . . here it is . . . it kind of made me think I should have painted Justin Hawkins riding it, maybe I should make an animated Christmas Darkness music video . . .

The Little Match Girl Passion: making the 3D world of her visions

So I've been working on The Little Match Girl Passion again this week.  In this live-animation I'm making for it I'm trying to create a world that is three-dimensional but made up of 2-D flat layers - drawn animations projected onto paper screens, paper cut-out shadow puppets, and here is the city for example, buildings drawn onto corrugated card and laid out in parallel formations . . .

when the match girl has her visions, however - when she strikes a match to keep warm and beautiful things reveal themselves in its glow - I wanted to make these in a different way, and I thought it would be somehow extra-real in this 2-D environment if everything in the visions was an actual three-dimensional object, like this dining room table at Christmas.  The white plate behind the cake in this picture is empty because its where the goose was, but in her vision the goose jumps up and runs away.

Here is a video where I show you some of these scenes I've built this week, and a couple of the puppets that live in those worlds . . .

The Little Match Girl Passion crowd animations

I've been working on some of the background animations for David Lang's The Little Match Girl Passion that I'm making a live-animation for, commissioned by Opera North, and wanted to show you some of it.  I've only done a very rough edit so far - rough in terms of compositing, the visual side of it I'm happy with.  I mostly use animations in live shows to create skies, weather conditions, journeys - things that don't have actual people or animals in, and I was trying to justify why it was okay to have some things live and some things as filmed animations if there were people in the scenes, but to me I feel that the looping crowd scenes echo the looping text in the music, and I think its a way of saying to you as the viewer you can disregard these big groups of people as anything more important than all you see here, they are like the clouds going by, or the snow, repeating and never-ending, the brain gets the hang of a loop quite quickly I think and disengages if it looks like nothing is going to happen other than repetition, so I will be able to then puppet the main character  - the match girl - live in front of these crowds.  Its her story, it happens to be happening right now as we tell this story, whereas there will always be a crowd, the city is a never ending loop of anonymous people.  Maybe I need to condense those sentences down a bit if I want to try and talk about this again, haha, but I hope you understand what I mean.

I'm working in charcoal for this, it has a dirty and dusty quality that feels suitable, kind of like I'm drawing with her burnt out matches, and actually when I opened the packet, i'd not bought this variety before, it looked like a little prop from a puppet film for her matches . . .

I was inspired to work this way watching William Kentridge's films.  I'm sure other people work this way too, but I haven't seen anyone else with such a confident rawness.   The basic technique is to draw an image, take a shot, erase it and draw the next image over the top, and as you erase each image and move forward it leaves behind a ghostly trace of the sequence.

And also as bits of charcoal crumble off (if you are working on a horizontal flat surface) they build up nicely around where the crowd's feet are supposed to be and look like footprints and dirty snow.

In my head I was trying to live in the worlds of Edward Gorey,  Joel Stewart and Lemony Snicket, which would be a strange but fun world. . . .

Here is a rough edit of the film: