French Canadian Director, Cinematographer and Photographer Christophe Collette created this gem from 2009- ‘Ce Soir’- a music video for the band Monogrenade.
This film reads like a well articulated dream. It makes full use of haunted yet bright empty spaces- it is neither too dark nor too sweet, yet does an artful dance between the two. The wild and rough forgotten landscape and the beautifully weathered abandoned house give it a sense of being outside of time. Casually elegant cinematography- the missing figures and floating clothes remind of the psychology of a Magritte painting. The angled glowing light is the main character and sets a lonely yet quietly portent scene, an evocative sense of longing, like an Edward Hopper. The slight staccato of the animated movements- like the static of an electric bulb, and the hovering objects and sudden appearances all lend to the poetic suspension of disbelief.

Here Christophe tells Dragon about the challenges of the marathon shoot:

This was a really low-fi shoot with multiple cameras. We used 4 Canon 5D MKII’s with Canon Series L zooms, one of the cameras was tethered to DSM, the other cameras were just working intuitively. We shot this in 4 days so you can imagine that we pretty much shot non-stop. We shot something like 10,000 pictures and edited down to a little under 2,000, the editing process could have been a lot more simple if everything had been shot with DSM that’s for sure. I did not know from the start what sort of stop-motion feeling I wanted out of the piece, I knew that in the time I had to shoot this I could have never achieved fluidity but we aimed for something that wasn’t too jerky either. My editor worked out a fantastic rhythm out of all that material and I am so grateful to him, I think he spent three weeks on the edit…

My inspiration on this was Jan Švankmajer’s Alice and the photography of Todd Hido for the darkness.

The house was the most important thing in mind at the start of the project, I needed the perfect house, because there was no art budget at all, the whole piece was shot on a 15K budget so there was no way we could afford to create a set like that one. We drove the countryside for weeks trying to find an abandoned house that I liked, we saw many, the one we selected was almost the last one we found- we had almost given up, it was in a field in a remote area in the Laurentians in northern Quebec, the windows had been covered with planks so we could not see inside the place. We looked for the owner of the house, found him and his daughter let us in. I cannot describe how amazed we were when we walked in. It was exactly what we had in mind.

The place was empty though, and I needed props, old and abandonned looking props. We decided to drive around that house to find another abandonned one with furniture inside, so we found another house, in the middle of a old cemetary, it’s the house that you see in the lake in the intro, I thought it looked better from the outside than our main house. There are a few scenes which were also shot in that house, the ones with a lot of props, but mostly we loaded a truck full of stuff, old chairs, frames, beds and mattresses, stuffed animals, etc, and brought all that over to the other house for the shoot. We were incredibly lucky to find all that, the owner for the let us do whatever we wanted in the house, even tear down walls.

The lake in the beginning is actually not a lake but a fjord in Lofoten, Norway I had shot a few months prior to the shoot. I wanted to include in the video because I loved the ruggedness of it and I thought it worked well with the house and all.

About half the shots were done with puppets, the other half with band members or actors (our cook and assistant stylist/ art director) wearing green suits. The post was done on Autodesk’s Flame by Daniel J Kelly at Motor VFX in Montreal. Dan did a tremendous job with the roto and all, the lighting was not controlled, almost all the video was shot in natural light so there was a lot of tweaking in between shots… I am very grateful to him for his contribution on this, I initially thought I would have to photoshop the whole thing or teach myself After Effects!

So it was a labor of love as you can grasp. Monogrenade is my brother’s band so I wanted to help him out a bit!

The video got an amazing amount of international attention, especially for a french canadian band. It was featured on Motionographer, Shots, Boards, on the frontpage of Vimeo and on about 500 blogs worldwide and about a dozen film festivals. It also made Mashable’s top 10 stop-motion videos on youtube.

I am mostly a cinematographer and photographer, not a director, I have worked on many projects using DSM since Ce Soir but currently I am working on commercials, all motion work, no stop-motion. I’ll let you know if I take on another adventure such as Ce Soir in the near future. I know that I would never shoot something like Ce Soir without Dragon in the future, it simplifies stop-motion a lot.

- Christophe Collette

Stopmotion Freud from luciano do amaral on Vimeo.

Brazilian Animator Luciano Do Amaral has made a brilliant and hilarious character animation piece in ‘Stop Motion Freud’. Scenery and props from the studio of animator Cesar Coelho of Campo 4, for the Miniseries “So what do women want?”.

The gestural expressions are subtle, complex (no pun intended), fluid and eccentric- just like their subject.

He used replacement mouths-but just the lips. The teeth and the beard remain constant with a kind of coil system that he’s created for himself. The video shows some his rigging setups. The piece was shot with Dragon Stop Motion, on ones at 24 frames per second to bring the character to life. With his keen observation of flamboyant quirks and passionate machinations – the animation of a complex mind, Luciano might be deserving of an honorary doctorate in Psychoanalysis himself. Hopefully his ‘ego’ doesn’t get carried away like it does at the end of the film.

“Elle Demeure” A new music video for Ana Dess directed by Hélène Ducrocq of KaAM Collective

Ducrocq creates a spare and stylish look to perfectly match the feel of the music. The song “Elle Demeure” (fr. translation ‘remains’) tells the story of a house, whose walls tell a story of the woman who lived within. Once a wild lone wolf, she marries, endures tragedies and finds escape through music.
Ducrocq turns the house into a stack of papers to denote the turning pages of a book, much like the passing days that make up a lifetime spent in a home. She uses a stratastencil technique for the tunneling shots as you’ll see in the making of video. These shots smoothly flow with the vocals and recounting of events through time. She then uses quick scene and motion changes to punctuate the piano. A great example of artful visualization of both music and content.

The making of video with footage of the stratastencil process (the interview is in french but the visuals are universal:)

Wolfgang Matzl, an animator and illustrator from Vienna, Austria remade “Inception” with paper cut-outs, all shot traditionally frame per frame with a Canon EOS 50D digital camera.

It was made for the “Done In 60 Seconds” competition by British film magazine “Empire”. The task was to recreate a movie of your choice in no more than a minute. This piece was one of the ten finalists in Berlin, Germany.

We interviewed Wolfgang about the project:

What was your visual inspiration?

I wanted to invoke the feeling of a pop-up book coming to life and also pay homage to Terry Gilliam and Jan Lenica.

Where there any features of DSM that you particularly appreciated?

I’ve used a different stop motion software before but it doesn’t even come close to Dragon Stop Motion.

This was my first time with Dragon Stop Motion and it was very easy to learn. At the same time it is very complex, your focus is definitely on the professional animator so I’m looking forward to going deeper in the future.

What I want to point out about Dragon Stop Motion is its stability. I was working very long hours and it never let me down, which is very important when you are working toward a tight deadline.

One feature which was indispensable for me is the Live View Magnification.

I am working on a 2D animated short at the moment but I’ve alread built a puppet for my next stop motion project, so I am looking forward to buy the full version this summer! There are so many cool features that I haven’t explored yet : )

Is there anything else you would like to tell us?

Dragon Stop Motion is a dream come true for every aspiring animator. Thank you for a great software and keep up the great work!

Thank you Wolfgang!

This animation was done for the Advertising Council’s 57th Annual Service Award Dinner to introduce all the health commercials that have been made this year.

We asked Hayley a few questions about the project:

Can you tell us about your inspiration for the spot?

For “Health” I wanted to visually express what the word means in a unique, clever, funny and beautiful. I came up with the idea of showing an unhealthy person vs. a healthy person with a split screen effect. The short is broken up into three sections. 1.Bad Food vs. Good Food   2. Negative Thinking vs. Positive Thinking 3. Inactive Vs. Active. I felt it was important to use clay because it is easily malleable and would show the transformation of the two heads, which started out identical in the beginning and went in opposite directions based on what they did to their bodies. As reference and inspiration I looked at the films of Jan Svankmajer.

Can you tell us a bit about about the process?

I started out drawing storyboards to get the timing and look. I then sculpted and drew all the tiny props, like the fruits and vegetables or the random objects the unhealthy man eats. I then made all the backgrounds using colorful and textured paper. Once I was done hand-making all the pieces it was time for animation, which had to be done in one shot. So, once I started I had to keep going until the end. Doing something straight forward like this is always a little stressful because if the camera shifts or a light gets kicked your animation is pretty much ruined.

I animated “Health” on a multiplane, which is an animation tool made of a series of panes of glass stacked on top of each other. The camera is placed above the glass and shoots through them creating the illusion of depth. I usually animate everything in camera at once, but for this project I shot the heads separately against blue screen and then shot the backgrounds after, using each layer of glass. The two parts were then composited together. The animation process was extremely tedious, because every frame is essentially a new sculpture. The clay really stuck to the glass, so if I wanted to move the head or a hand I would have to rip it off and sculpt it again. It was basically like doing hand-drawn animation with clay. I also had to clean the glass every frame because the clay left a residue around each figure. I really wanted the two heads to feel alive even when they were still, so I constantly animated the clay circulating with fingerprints and subtle blinks. I also liked adding other materials besides clay to give a unique look. For example, when the unhealthy man was smoking I used pillow stuffing for the smoke and charcoal for the blackness that fills his lungs. I think little touches like these add a lot to the piece. I also created the soundtrack, which was made from sound effects I recorded as well as stock sound that I layered in protools to create two distinct sounds for both characters. Overall I love how it came out and it was worth standing on my feet for 2 weeks straight to have these two heads come to life and tell a story.

Were there any special Dragon Stop Motion features that were essential?

Dragon really helped to create this piece. The tool I used a lot was the line tool. For example when the two clay balls roll into frame in the beginning and form into two heads I used the line tool to create a guide for myself. I drew the outline of the two heads as well as the split screen line to know where the two balls of clay needed to end up. Without this tool it would have been difficult to make two identical looking heads. It also helped me to see the split screen line, so I knew not to make a hand or an object cross into the other side.

The other feature that was very helpful was, adding a line up movie. Since I did the heads on blue screen first I needed to line up the backgrounds perfectly with the heads. This tool allowed me to load the head footage, which showed up like an onionskin. This allowed me to see the backgrounds through my camera as well as the heads so I could line them up perfectly and create the right composition.