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| Animator Jeremy Fisher |
When
Jeremy Fisher was about 12, he became fascinated with
stop motion animation after seeing the “Star Wars” movie.
He began animating his Star Wars action
figures to reproduce his favorite scenes.
After completing a Fine Arts degree at Ringling College, he moved to Los
Angeles where he has worked on “Marcel the Shell with Shoes on” and “Robot
Chicken.”
While he learned to do
computer animation in school, Jeremy finds working with physical objects much
more satisfying.
“I build things and
make them move,” he said, summing up his work as an animator.
I caught Jeremy's Joelanta presentation on the way back from a two week residency at
Hambidge where I had gone to work on a stop
motion animation project so I greatly appreciated the overview of the stop
motion process and the many useful tips he offered aspiring animators.
The basic
set up requires a space where the animator can control the lighting.
As the sun moves over the horizon and clouds
pass in front of it, daylight constantly changes.
Stop motion animators must therefore use
artificial light in order to keep the lighting consistent from frame to frame.
Jeremy set up a mini stage under his dorm bed
when he was in college.
Today he does
his freelance work in a home dark room.
My studio at Hambidge had no blinds or curtains on most of the windows so
I was not able to create the ideal conditions for shooting but back in my
brother’s windowless basement my shooting stage looks like this:
Like most
industry professionals, Jeremy uses Dragon Frame, an animation program that
costs about $300.
If you have a Mac you
can get good results with iStop Motion which I purchased for $50.
The $10 version of this program will run on
an iPad or iPhone while Framegrapher for the iPhone is only $5.
Onion skinning is one of the most useful features
that animation software platforms provide.
It automatically shows an overlay of the previous image as you set up
the next shot so you can keep track of movement from frame to frame.
This is especially helpful if you
accidentally displace objects in the shot and need to put them back where they
were before capturing the next image.
Indeed, keeping
the puppets stationary in between shots is one of the biggest challenges stop
motion animators face.
Reaching in to
move a puppet’s hand can displace the figure or other elements in the set,
resulting in extraneous movement on screen when the images are played back in
sequence.
Stop motion animators
frequently glue or peg their puppets to the stage floor while they are
working.
I experimented with gluing
magnets to my puppets’ feet, but haven’t yet found any glue that bonds
securely.
Jeremy further recommends
using sticky wax from Michaels to help puppets keep their grip on props like
light sabers.
Keeping the
camera stationary during shooting is also essential so Jeremy mounts his camera
on a tripod that clamps to his table when he is working.
He uses a DSLR camera, but these days
smartphones, iPads, iPods, and pocket cameras can all shoot in HD so amateurs can get good
image quality with inexpensive devices.
I
bought a Joby Gorilla tripod and an iShot G7 Pro iPad holder to mount my equipment.
A wireless number key pad enables Jeremy to
control the camera through the animation software on his computer so that he
doesn’t have to touch it to capture images.
This way he avoids accidentally bumping the camera between shots.
I purchased a wireless remote but
there was no WiFi in my studio at Hambidge so iStop Motion was not able to
recognize my iPad as a capture device even though it was connected with a
lightening cable.
Jeremy
collected eight boxes of action figures while playing with stop motion
animation techniques in his youth but these days he makes most of his own
puppets.
He favors 1/16 armature
wire, but notes that there are other suitable types of wire available at Home
Depot and even floral wire can work well.
Recently he has begun designing figures on the computer and then having
them 3D printed. Time is of the essence in an art form that requires 700 to 900 exposures for one minute of film. I worked feverishly to
make six puppets from 18 gauge wire and aquarium tubing before heading to
Hambidge.
Each puppet has six
interchangeable faces representing different emotions and six different pairs
of hands all molded from Paper Clay.
Being able to 3D print those
parts would have saved me a lot of time.
Although Helena Smith Dayton, a Greenwich Village artist who sculpted a popular series of clay caricatures produced a stop motion adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” in 1917, animation remained a “where the boys are” enclave until the advent of You Tube. Today many girls and women are posting stop motion animation videos that feature their American Girl, Monster High, or 1:6 scale fashion dolls on You Tube and other web streaming sites. For example
Shasarignis has been producing stop motion animation fashion doll videos for years.
Hey, It's Muff recently purchased a smartphone app that can produce time lapse and stop motion video so she has been sharing her experiments with this technology and inspiring us all to try our hand in this exciting medium. After all why should
boys have all the fun?
A bientôt!
