My First Stop Motion Character

Here's the link to the youtube video on the making of Terror! Scroll down to watch him in action!

My issue with creating is being way too overcritical & trashing most ideas because they aren't worthy (like Richard Williams making the Thief and The Cobbler). But with this project, I sketched out the character and decided to just make it and animate it. I just wanted to learn.

This is the concept sketch & the blueprint for the puppet in scale:

I had watched the Chiodo Bros. (legendary stop-motion and creature effects wizards & creators of Killer Klowns from Outer Space) course on the Stan Winston School of Character Arts on Stop Motion & it was a huge help in getting started. I have tons of notes in a notebook that I will share in some other post but my making of video goes through the whole puppet-making process.

After my first few lessons in the Animators Survival Kit, I put it to practice and planned a short 3-second shot.

This was just a loose calculation. I briefly skimmed over the pages on walks but decided to just animate the sequence and learn as I go. The actual sequence ended up being 3 seconds long at 24 frames per second so a total of 72 frames.

It took me about 3 hours to animate. I just did it based on the drawings and the feel of it. I also acted it out as I went along for reference. I do see that it is a bit choppy so for a smoother animation next time I would move through the spacing a bit more smoothly with some additional frames. A huge difficulty with my iPhone camera is the closer it is to the subject, the more ideal for the clarity because the zoom loses quality but it left very little room for the resculpting process. Another thing to consider is the height of the table. I would animate on a taller table because this one was too close to the floor and made it difficult on my neck and legs to sculpt an animate. The last thing is I didn’t build an actual stage to animate on just yet, that’s why it's framed in a medium shot to close up. I think it would be best to build one because the little stand was not glued into place so it did shift in some frames because of my accidental nudging. However, this is my first attempt at animating a stop-motion puppet, so this was purely for learning reasons. Enjoy the short clip :)