Cumulus

Max Moertl shows us some whimsical ingenuity in these two shorts created in the Design Department at HAW Hamburg. Adding to their charm is the quirky and well crafted sound design. We look forward to more projects from Max. Below, he provides us with some insight into his process.

Max-
Der Konsument

The idea for the clay animation “Der Konsument” (The Consumer) crossed my mind at the supermarket. A place where the overload of products from which to choose leads to desperate and random purchases and special offers convince the dizzied customer to buy, buy, buy. I thought about this misguided consumption and explored whether the ‘special guest’ in my animation would be able to develop healthy consumer behaviors.

I started with conceiving of different meals, and then drew a minimalistic storyboard and then arranged the meals in a sensible order. After building the set and moulding the character out of clay I began animating. During the animation, I had a rough plot in my mind, but sometimes I spontaneously added or changed actions. The most challenging and time-consuming part was to animate the different phases of the mouth without using replacements.

In this project I was working with Dragon Stop Motion for the first time. Right from the start it is easy to control and I am impressed by the program’s helpful options. I used the toggle option to replace the eyes and to repair broken tentacles. With the drawing tool, I drew guides for flying objects. 

Cumulus

The stop motion animation “Cumulus” was made for a group exhibition with the theme ‘water’. In my work I focused on the value and need for water and decided to let a small drop communicate these issues to the viewer. It was exciting for me to portray water in its different states. By having the ability of transforming between these states, the drop finds its own way through the story.

It was a challenge for me to animate water and to find suitable techniques to render each of the different states. After some tests with different liquids I decided to animate with real water. Equipped with a pipette I moved the water, drop by drop, each step further along. In some takes I used continuous shooting to capture the movement of the water. Animating with ice was a bit stressful due to the limitation on time caused by melting. A nylon thread which was frozen into the ice made it easier to control the movement and prevented the ice from slipping away. To make the steam touchable I used cotton for the clouds. It was important for me to create all effects on location without computer animation to achieve a tactile look – for example the lightning was done with light painting.

Dragon Stop Motion was very helpful during the animation and enabled me to work fast with precision on the project. An essential feature was the reverse playback which helped me to capture and view scenes in reverse order.

The Eagleman Stag – Trailer from Michael Please on Vimeo.

Michael Please has released a trailer for his new short film, The Eagleman Stag. Michael is a recent animation graduate from the Royal College of Art, where they use Dragon Stop Motion animation software. The trailer for The Eagleman Stag is beautiful and will leave you anticipating the full film.

We were excited to interview Michael about making the film.

How long did you work on it?

“It’s been a long time in the making! At 9 minutes it’s nearly twice the length of anything I’ve done before. The film has 115 separate shots, of which the vast majority have separate sets custom build specifically for each camera angle. So I had my work cut out. I spent 6 months on the actual build, shoot and post, but the film itself has been gestating as an idea for quite some time. The two months prior to shooting were spent adapting the short story I had written previously into a screenplay then fleshing out the film as much as possible in 2D. The 2D animatic is extremely close, almost shot for shot compared to the final film, so there was no room for chuff! When I showed this 2D animatic to a senior tutor at the RCA they described it as the most horrifically ambitious project they had seen in all their years of teaching. That made me very happy at the time. Later on, when I realized how right they were about the ‘horrific’ nature of it, I wasn’t quite so smug.”

What camera(s) did you use?

“The entire film was pretty much shot in camera, on my trusty Canon EOS 1000D. There are a lot fancier newfangled cameras out there, but for stopmotion, and the image size, it was all I needed. I did however go through about a week of faffing about with various setups, trying to work with manual lenses, and different cameras to rid myself of a mind-bendingly frustrating flicker issue that I couldn’t shake off. After some investigating I found that my automatic lens was the cause, as when the aperture opens up for live view it doesn’t close back to within 100% accuracy each time, which makes no difference for single photographs, but obviously with stopmotion it was a problem I had to resolve later on.”

How was Dragon Stop Motion helpful to you?

“Dragon was a wonderful tool and really helped the whole animation process. It’s such a fiddly, fisting the sky in frustration, pencil snapping process anyway, that anything to help tiny inanimate objects move bit by bit by bit a little more smoothly is warmly welcomed. It’s a complex program, but intuitively designed so that whenever I needed to do something new, I didn’t have to root through the help book, I could just naturally find my way. There are so many great details, being able to move reference footage around the screen, and shift the audio clip in the time line, and of course the whole cinematography window, I don’t know how I ever functioned without it! You can really tell its been designed by animators, because its those little things, the saving of annoyances, that are so helpful in alleviating the sometimes stressful process of animating.”

“Actually, one of my favorite things about the program is the Dragon Pad! This became indispensable on loads of shots as I physically needed to use both hands to hold things in view as I animated them. In the past I’ve either had to have someone else there or headbut/ spit objects at the Enter key in order to take the shot, but with the pad, it was just off with the socks and shoes and time to get toe capture happy.”

“So yes, thanks Dragon, you are a wonderful asset to the fine art of stopmotion!”

The final film is traveling the festival circuit at the moment. You can follow Michael on twitter.com/MisterPlease if you’d like to know where its screening next.

Dried Up from Cecil on Vimeo.

Jeremy Casper, Stuart Bury, and Isaiah Powers co-wrote and directed “Dried Up”, a six minute stop motion animation shot with Dragon Stop Motion. Recently, they were awarded the Silver Student Academy Award in the Animation category. The award was presented by Henry Selick.

“Dried Up” is the story of a quiet old man who, surrounded by desolation and apathy, perseveres to remain true to the nature of his own beliefs and character. He toils daily to forge a last ditch effort to bring hope and life to a faithless, drought ridden old town.

As students of animation at Kansas City Art Institute, they were early adopters of Dragon Stop Motion software, and they are some of its biggest fans.

We asked Isaiah Powers about using our software for this film:

“I think first I would simply like to say, thank you. We used Dragon Stop Motion to shoot every frame of our film and the longer we used it the more excited we got about it. Any time we got to a point where we needed a specific feature it was already there. I have never used a bit of software that was so intuitive and allowed us to get straight to work so fast. In the stressful environment of stop-motion production it was a relief. At one point we were ready to start animating Cecil playing his organ and we thought, we need an x-sheet so we can sync his motions to the music… you know I bet there is one programmed in here, so far it has had everything else we wanted. Within a few clicks we found the Dragon X-Sheet and were busy loading music in and setting up the shot.

“Another thing I found especially helpful was the ability to easily switch between the high res photo taken and the preview photos. Our sets were highly detailed and made it possible to keep up with everything. It also helped realign the camera if I accidentally bumped the set in an impromptue dance.

“We had basically no budget for our film. I made a hand cranked camera dolly for about $30. We used clamp lights and waxed paper for diffusion. The most expensive thing we used was hot glue. We scavenged for cardboard and built our sets with found objects. The main character in our film, Cecil builds his creations out of junk he finds around town so we figured if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for us. Dragon is a pro application priced for everyone, and I tell that to anybody who asks me about shooting stopmotion, you gotta use it! “

Here is what Jeremy Casper had to say about our software:

“Dragon is affordable for both the professional and student. We basically created our film with very little to no money, so being able to buy such an amazing program made the experience tangible. I could go on and on about Dragon, but seriously who has that kind of time on their hands. To anyone who asks me, Dragon is the only program for this kind of medium, period.”

“Dried Up” continues its way through the animation film festival circuit. Next up is the Melbourne International Animation Festival.

Jeremy Casper’s Blog
http://cazpear.wordpress.com
Isaiah Powers’s Site
http://isaiahpowers.com
Stuart Bury’s Blog
http://stuartbury.blogspot.com
Dried Up Blog
http://driedup.wordpress.com

Burning through the animation festival circuit, Max Winston’s “I Live In The Woods!” picks up awards and kudos. Cal Arts grad Max Winston’s thesis film is a high energy stop motion feast of colors and colorful characters. Max bravely and seamlessly weaves together on-set stop motion with live actors and exterior shots, creating a short film with an unexpected and fresh esthetic.

Check out “I Live In The Woods” site

Check out a time-lapse making of.

Pigeon Pilfer from Michael Stevenson on Vimeo.

Pigeon Pilfer is a beautifully animated stop-motion film from Michael Stevenson. It is his senior film as a student at San Francisco State University. It took him four months to complete and involved sixty pounds of clay. It was shot with a Canon DSLR using Dragon Stop Motion animation software.

Here are some stills from the film and a behind-the-scenes shot of Michael on the set:

We asked Michael if he wanted to share his thoughts about Dragon:

“Dragon is by far the most valuable tool in my stop motion toolbox. I began working on Pigeon Pilfer a few months before Dragon was released, so I tried out most of the available stop motion software on both Mac and Windows. I was so unhappy with it all that I attempted to program my own frame grabber.

“Thankfully Dragon came to save the day just one week before I started shooting. It’s the only software I’ve used that simply steps out of the way – it allows me to animate without being encumbered by a complex frame wrangling workflow. By the end of the shoot it was clear that Dragon had things well in hand—all of my captured frames were very clearly marked and sorted, immediately ready for post production. From start to finish, everything just worked.”

Check out the behind-the-scenes gallery on the Pigeon Pilfer website.