Explore the world behind the scenes of stop-motion animation
Guanjing(Yoyo) Mu | 21/09/2024
On September 21, I was invited by a friend to visit the exhibition – LAIKA: Frame x Frame. The whole exhibition area is not large, but full of details, fully showing me the props used in stop-motion animation of LAIKA Studio and the behind-the-scenes shooting process.
“Founded in Oregon in 2005 by President & CEO Travis Knight, LAIKA creates films that are born in imagination, shaped into stories, and crafted by passionate artists who give life to unforgettable characters” (LAIKA Studios ).
The exhibition introduces visitors to the various aspects of stop-motion animation production by showing different keyframes from the five films, revealing the collaborative creation behind the scenes, and showing how these works of art were born.
In the exhibition, I was surprised that many objects that look large on the screen, such as characters, furniture, foods and even buildings, but their size are actually very small in reality. Some of them are even as small as fingernails. What’s more worth mentioning is that although the size of these props is small, the details are very realistic, such as the wear marks on the puppet’s clothing look very real.
Watching the explanatory footage of the shooting process, I couldn’t help but admire the huge amount of work behind stop-motion animation, and began to have a great interest in the puppet production behind the stop-motion animation. When I got home, I logged onto the official website of LAIKA Studios and watched several interview videos with the film Coraline as an example.
In the interview video, as the director Henry claims: “The puppet is the actor on the screen, and they are the animator’s tool to express their performance ability.” Therefore, in order to complete the performance and shooting, all the puppets must be very flexible and fully poseable.
Although the skin of the doll is flexible and elastic, the skeleton inside is very strong. Just like Georgina, character fabrication supervisor, claims that the core of a puppet in stop-motion film is to have the armature, just like a human skeleton. These armature structures must be able to support the puppet itself, and under the animator’s control, every joint of the puppet must be able to move and stop where the animator wants it to stay in motion.
Splitting the doll’s face in two parts is a trick used in stop-motion animation to control the expression of the doll, so that the eyes, eyebrows and mouth expressions can be controlled separately.
The body and skin are made of silicone, as it looks very close to human skin, and you can change its softness depending on how much you need to move.
The puppet’s hair is made of glue, tiny wires and synthetic hair. Synthetic hair mimics the texture of real hair, while glue and tiny wires hidden in the synthetic hair make each hair controllable and hold it in place.
All in all, after visiting the exhibition of LAIKA: Frame x Frame, I became very interested in the puppet manufacturing and shooting of stop-motion animation. Although, as a 2D animation student, I do not plan to switch from 2D animation to stop-motion animation, I’m looking forward to meeting a chance to try stop-motion animation in future. Furthermore, I also began to think whether I can learn some of the skills to make a simple puppet of my own, perhaps it can help me shoot some special performance/action references.