Bianca Ansems has created a really fantastic piece with this underwater adventure using semitranslucent fabric, cutouts and a multiplane:

The London International Animation Festival wanted a trailer to celebrate their upcoming animation festival and their new home, the Barbican. LIAF is the UK’s largest animation festival, showcasing more than 250 films annually and screening over ten days and nights at Central London Cinemas from the 26th of August to the 4th of September.

Both Daniela Negrin Ochoa and I have made trailers for this year. Be sure to check hers out too!

This year’s focus theme for LIAF is ‘cutout’. Inspired by my previous animation ‘AIRMAIL‘ and the BBC Blue Planet documentary ‘The Deep’ I wanted to try and create an exploring experience of the London Thames. For all we know, there might well be jellyfishes and octos in it!

-Bianca Ansems

LAIKA, the studio behind the stop motion, 3D feature film Coraline, is currently busy on many stop motion projects including a new 3D feature film. While we cannot divulge information about the film, we can tell you they are using Dragon Stop Motion for all of their shooting in both their House and Entertainment divisions.

LAIKA has the distinction as an animation company that its CEO is also a world class animator. Travis Knight was the lead animator on Coraline, tackling the toughest shots and always bringing a depth and emotion to his performances.

Travis Knight-

“Dragon is a extraordinary achievement in design and function, an elegant blend of creativity and technology.  LAIKA uses Dragon on both our commercial and feature film stages as the core piece of our production technology.  It is a program that is at once simple and sophisticated: accessible and intuitive for the most troglodytic artist, yet sufficiently deep and robust for the most grizzled, technophilic veteran.  With its ingenious interface, reliable performance, and exhaustive set of features, Dragon is as essential to modern stop-motion production as an X-Acto blade and a power drill.  It makes other frame-grabbing tools seem as antiquated as a surface gauge.  I can’t imagine animating with anything else.”

Thank you Travis for that amazing quote—we hope we continue to live up to those expectations.

Visual effects icon and stop motion visionary Phil Tippet recently received the Goerges Melies Award for pioneering contributions to the art and science of visual effects. He is also celebrating the 25th year of Tippet Studios. Phil’s studio is responsible for creature effects on projects as varied as Starship Troopers to the recent Twilight series.

Phil may point to seeing Ray Harryhausen’s “The 7th Voyage” as a critical point of inspiration in his youth, but please allow me to share a critical point of inspiration for my generation. It was 1980, and in a darkened theater, out of an icy fog, through video binoculars of some sort, images of something huge, walking silhouettes of metal monsters making their way across the tundra struck fear, excitement and pure movie magic in an unsuspecting audience. The Imperial Walkers scene from The Empire Strikes Back is still one of the most impressive uses of stop motion in a live action context.

Soon after Empire, Phil won an Academy Award for his innovative mix of computer controlled armatures with straight ahead stop motion on the movie “Dragonslayer”. The process was called “Go-Motion”. Go-Motion added motion blur to the stop motion process.

Phil’s animation spoke to me and many others my age. The subsequent “Making of” docs showing the stop motion process inspired me to build a miniature landscape in my bedroom through the lens of an 8mm film camera.

I’ve gone the long way around to announce that Phil has recently started shooting a special stop motion project at his studio using Dragon Stop Motion. It’s hard to explain how excited we are here at Dragon.

We recently visited Tippett Studios, met Phil and his crew and were lucky enough to see the rushes of his project. Here is what Phil had to say about using Dragon Stop Motion:

Phil Tippett -

“I had been working on a stop motion project in the early 1990′s and shelved it when the computer revolution hit with a vengeance. Discouraged and overwhelmed by the computer graphic cool-aid that just about everyone had to drink, I shelved the project until some of my crew saw me archiving the ancient stuff for the project I call MadGod.  Their excitement for the material—that they thought was some lost ancient eastern european thing—rejuvenated my interest in the material. I resurrected my crumbling puppets and—now with all the new digital cameras and DRAGON I have been able to resume shooting.

“DRAGON’s breadth and depth as a shooting package is really remarkable and is a tool that has allowed me to resurface doing the the kind of hands on work that got me into this fine mess to begin with.

“THANK YOU DRAGON!”

(No, Thank you Phil, from all of your fans)

-Jamie Caliri

If the name Breakthru Films rings a stop motion bell for you – you may remember their Academy Award winning short: Peter and The Wolf. For their newest stop motion adventure, they equiped their stages with Dragon Stop Motion. The Flying Machine (in 3D) celebrates Chopin’s 200th birthday with an epic journey that takes flight on a magical piano. The film is set to premiere in Beijing, London and Warsaw. You will be hearing more from us about this ambitious project soon.

The Flying Machine was shot using our IOTA 3D Sliders and IOTA Controllers. The Breakthru team started production with other commercially available 3D sliders. Unfortunately these were not production ready in terms of strength and repeatability, so they turned to IOTA . Here is what the Breakthru camera team had to say about using our IOTA 3D System.

Excerpt:
“We had the opportunity to try other 3D solutions before we began to use Dragon Stop Motion’s IOTA system. To explain, we used Dragon Stop Motion software from the beginning of shooting–before the release of the IOTA 3D system. We were drawn to Dragon’s multiple exposures, which could easily adapt to work in stereo. Dragon Stop Motion worked with 3D sliders from other companies, although these sliders were far from ideal.

How does the IOTA 3D slider perform? The first thing worth noting is the surprisingly lightweight, compact design, which, despite its small size is able to work in any position and at any angle. Even with heavy cameras and lenses, the IOTA slider keeps perfect accuracy. This is great to see, given our experience with other sliders. Another noteworthy feature is the high temperature resistance.

The IOTA 3D slider is fully integrated with Dragon, so it’s controlled by the software. This solution allows us to achieve high flexibility, unattainable with other systems. Setting any starting position or reversing stereo channels is rarely needed but we really appreciate the options.

We particularly appreciate Dragon’s ability to preview in 3D. The opportunity to evaluate stereo directly in Dragon, without exporting to compositing programs, truly accelerates our work flow. It’s not just that Dragon gives you a 3D preview, it gives you professional 3D controls such as parallax adjustment for both channels and calipers for measuring the degree of the parallax. Such nuances as the ability to assign floating 3D window only add to our enthusiasm for the IOTA / Dragon system. With Dragon 3D, all of the tools a stereographer needs are at hand.

Dragon gives us the ability to assign three stereo interoculars. This enables us to achieve multiple IO’s in a single pass. It is especially useful for tests or even bracketing your interocular. This feature in 3D sliders will be appreciated particularly by those who want to have stereo adapted to varying display sizes.

The IOTA is unquestionably the best 3D slider we have used…”

Director Johnny Kelly and the team at Clapham Road Studios UK serve up another ambitious stop motion feast. Shot using Dragon Stop Motion animation software, the camera flies through full-size artwork, including a play button covered in real gold leaf.  The project is part of a collaboration between You Tube and the Guggenheim Foundation that will showcase creative clips from around the world.

They have already racked up over one million views. Make sure to check out the Making of as well.