Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance

Barry Purves

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136140617
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Computer Science
• Categoria: Digital Media

Be inspired by award-winning animator Barry Purves' honest insight into the creative process of making stop motion animations, using his own classic films to illustrate every step along the way. With Barry's enthusiasm for puppets in all their many guises and in-depth interviews from some of the world's other leading practitioners, there is advice, inspiration and entertainment galore in Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance. And there's more! Many of the artists and craftsmen interviewed have contributed their own specially drawn illustrations - showing their inspirations, heroes and passion for their craft. These beautiful images help make the book a truly personal journey into the heart of the animation industry with broad appeal for anyone with a love of animation.

1 Passion

Jack Point in The Yeomen of the Guard (Richard Haynes).

I've wisdom from the east and from the west

That's subject to no academic rule

You may find it in the jeering of a jest

Or distil it in the folly of a fool.

I can teach you with a quip if I've a mind

I can trick you into learning with a laugh;

Oh, winnow all my folly and you'll find

A grain or two of truth amongst the chaff.

W.S. Gilbert, The Yeomen of the Guard

1 Smoke and Mirrors

DOI: 10.4324/9780080555799-1

I have long since been enthralled by magicians. I watched the charming David Nixon on TV (who introduced the glove puppet Basil Brush to the unwitting world), and loved the ease of his performance. I was never keen on the over-glitzy presentation of Siegfried and Roy (their magic inseparable from a distracting camp element), or the smarm of David Blaine, as these performers tend to have too much show, with plastic assistants and unnecessary technology, detracting from the trick itself. A magician's audience know that a woman is never likely to be actually sawn in half; they like to flirt with believing but no more. There is a complicity. If a woman was sawn in half, the whole event would lose its point and the woman her life! We are willing to be tricked and fooled, and the more fooled we are the more satisfying the experience. What makes the trick better is the element of doubt, where the audience's perception of what is real and what is not is pushed to an uncomfortable limit.

This is like countless TV detective shows and Agatha Christie novels: if we knew whodunnit on page one, there would be little point in reading on. The fun is trying to work out what happened or who did what to whom. We want to be tricked and gulled, and misdirected, with the final unmasking of the murderer bringing a complex feeling of being angry for not having seen it coming and a glorious fulfilment at having been so deliciously deceived.

Having watched dozens of magic shows, there is one inescapable moment essential to every trick: there has to be a moment of misdirection, and it's in this split second that the mechanics of the trick happens unseen. Misdirection could be the puff of smoke as a genie appears on stage, or the shutting of a cabinet, or the elaborate swishing of a black cape, or the pulling of a ubiquitous curtain, or the blindfolding of the eyes, or the closing of a fist, or the sealing of an envelope, or the shuffle of a pack of cards or a glamorous assistant innocently tinkering with something. There is an instant when something is concealed from the audience, and the magician's art is to make this moment as brief and as subtle as possible. Usually it involves some element of black or darkness, where the trick is able to be carried out unseen.

The animation trick

For animators, that moment of misdirection is there twenty-fives frames a second (in the UK at least). It's a black frame that does not register with the audience, and allows the animator, acting as both magician and glamorous assistant, to step in and tinker with the puppets, rearranging everything before stepping out again, as if nothing had happened. The audience hasn't seen us, but they see the trick. The puppet appears to have moved.

Stop motion is, using an appropriate Tommy Cooper segue, just like that. We know it's a trick, and enjoy going along for the ride, seeing that these puppets or drawings have the credible illusion of life. We give them that illusion. I was confused when I saw Disney's Snow White. The dwarves were a huge hit as they were obviously animated in being exaggerated, stretchy and squashy, but they still had a recognisable truth that came through the caricature: a lie that told a truth. Snow White herself, with much of her animation being as a result of rotoscoping, had an unsettling effect on me. I didn't like it, and didn't want to watch her. She belonged in a different film (though I appreciate she was meant to be different from the dwarves), and her realistic timing and movements so out of place next to the animals and the dwarves. I didn't want to see realism in a totally elastic world. In this situation and with the conventions of the dwarves, her naturalistic movement destroyed her credibility.

An essential part of a magician's trick is his costume, and which is often black. Black is not there for pure sartorial fancy, but because most things can disappear against black. I love the distracting cod mysticism and theatrical flim-flam that magicians dress their tricks up with, but I want to challenge them to perform some tricks naked in a bright white room, where nothing could be hidden. Houdini often did exactly that. The tiny picks necessary for his escape were, well if he had nothing up his sleeve, they were probably up somewhere else. Even under these naked circumstances a magician is still able to use his own body to hide things. My barber, Edward, is a magician at night, and often does tricks whilst cutting hair. He has no black cloak but cleverly uses the back of your head in the mirror to block out his moment of deceit. As he stands behind you, your own reflection prevents you seeing his palming of cards. This, with the disorientation of looking in a mirror, makes for some effective trickery … and he's a great barber. We animators couldn't do our tricks if our black cloak, the black frame, was taken away from us.

The years 2006 and 2007 saw a wealth of films about magicians and illusionists, with more to come, mainly set at the turn of the twentieth century. Magic, for me, has always had a blurred line separating it from stop motion. The audience know that both are a trick, but are happy to go along with this, having their disbelief suspended as far as possible. Should the magician go too far, then the contract between the audience and magician is broken. If it a puppet were to behave totally realistically, we would be disconcerted, and would feel cheated. We enjoy its artifice.

Pepper's ghost

It fascinates me that there should be so many films about smoke and mirrors, and it upsets me as well, as a film about the legendary Pepper's ghost has been in my head for some time. The influential trick, a sheet of glass angled across the stage, reflecting the transparent image of someone brightly lit off stage, had a fascinating story behind it. The trick was not developed by Pepper at all. He brought it from another, somewhat struggling magician, Henry Dircks, when it was called, rather clumsily, the Dircksian phantasmagoria (detailed beautifully in Jim Steinmeyer's book, Hiding the Elephant). As in recent times, when a new effect, or a new technology, is developed and films are written to incorporate the innovation, so Pepper's ghost appeared in all manner of stage productions adapted to show off this illusion. Literally, ghosts were popping up everywhere. Not just ghosts, but lit properly, the figure could appear to be flesh and blood, and disappear in the fraction of a second it took to turn off a light. Sometimes, the nature of the trick was reversed, so the set that was the illusion and real characters appeared to be walking through solid architecture.

Harry Houdini, showman (Joe Clarke)

The Victorian stage effect Pepper's ghost, ancestor of our blue screens and mattes (Richard Haynes).

As the nineteenth turned into the twentieth century technology was letting the arts run riot. Stage spectacles of ships sinking and chariot races twice nightly at Drury Lane, competed alongside the less literal miracles of the illusionists and magicians. In France the Grand Guignol was providing macabre entertainment, all the more macabre for its taking place in front of a live audience. The stage spectacles tried to compete with the developing cinema, and they were not afraid to meet in the middle. The marvellous Georges Méliès, a man I definitely admire, was mixing theatre, film and brilliantly inventive and witty special effects, developing techniques that are still applicable today. Throw in dozens of leggy beauties and he had a box-office success. It is hard to say whether Méliès was a film-maker, a magician, a great theatre technician or what, but he was a dazzling showman with a prolific imagination, using smoke and mirrors to make money. He developed many ideas and techniques that we still use in stop motion. We still stop the camera and replace an object with a different one to suggest something shrinking; we use false perspective; we superimpose and matte floating objects against a background, with either invisible black or blue screens. He was a giant in the development of special effects, and brilliantly light hearted and giddy with it. Pure entertainment, and one day I would like to pay homage with my own film.

Before computer graphics (CG) and when postproduction budgets were reasonably realistic, I used Pepper's ghost many times in animation, mainly to add insubstantial elements such as smoke, falling glitter or, rather clumsily, in a film of Cinderella, where a shimmering ball of light tried, and failed, to anticipate the appearance of the Fairy Godmother. On shows like The Wind in the Willows, we used sheets of glass for a variety of tricks, especially for the exhaust from Toad's car. A simple white chinagraph pencil animated on the glass lined up to the exhaust pipe beyond would easily pass for smoke if it was suitably lit and out of focus, this latter being the essential element. An effective use saw Toad dressed as a washerwoman (ah, the joys of animation!) and being conned by a barge woman to wash some smalls, including a rather fetching corset. I wanted to make it look as if he was unfamiliar with such menial things, and have the bar of soap slip out of his hand. Toad held a prop bar of yellow soap, but to suggest it flying out of his hand, I simply replaced it on the glass with a matching piece of yellow paper, which being nearer the camera was out of focus, giving a welcome motion blur. Many times I have animated a falling leaf on glass, and then replaced it for a matching prop leaf as it landed on a character's head. Leaves, splashing mud, balls, balloons, butterflies and a million other cheap tricks. We still use glass shots today, but in general this would be done in CG. It pleases me to use something developed by Victorian illusionists. It is still used regularly in theatre. It was interesting to see a legendary stage effect of an orange tree bursting into blossom and then bearing fruit demonstrated in the recent film The Illusionist, except the trick, looking magnificent as it did, it appeared to be performed through CG.

The great early magician, the elegant Robert Houdin (b 1805–1871), cut back on the superfluous dressing that had previously cluttered the stage. He appeared simply in evening dress, with basic stage props, one step away from my naked magician. Against this simplicity, the tricks read more effectively. That's an approach I try to apply. It's all about letting the trick read, and making the story clear.

All stop motion animators are magicians, or at least we think like magicians. We ...