Here is a great film that is not only fun, experimental and well photographed—it’s animated beautifully. That’s a tough list to pull off, so hats off to Andy Kennedy on this marvel. Oh—we should mention that Andy created the catchy music track as well!

From Andy’s Vimeo description: Natural and man-made objects on a spin cycle accumulate, disintegrate, and multiply. Created by stop motion animating clay on glass, the film is a meditation on motion and the life cycle of matter.

Halfway through production Andy started shooting with Dragon Stop Motion 2.0.

Andy Kennedy – “I have to say you guys put together a really phenomenal piece of software.”

“Dragon is the first piece of stop motion software I’ve used that really feels like it was created by animators. It’s a really well thought out program, and I find it very intuitive to use. I basically opened the program and was shooting scenes for my movie within 20 minutes. I love how well the live view features of the Canon SLRs are integrated into the work flow.”

Andy has a thorough “Making of ” Blog. Check it out.

Watch the trailer for The Eagleman Stag

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.

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.

With our 2.1 release, we introduced two new (optional) hardware devices that integrate seamlessly with Dragon Stop Motion. The DDMX-S2 provides automated lighting support, as well as some basic input and output triggers for interacting with external devices. Our 2.2 release improves the DMX support by allowing you to easily move lighting keyframes by selecting and dragging them. The result is a much smoother process for editing your lighting programs.

The IOTA 3D Stereoscopic Slider, when paired with the IOTA Controller and Dragon Stop Motion software creates the most robust 3D stop-motion animation solution. Now with 2.2, you can refine advanced 3D settings such as your interocular values (the distance at which the left and right eye images are captured), the convergence (the offset of left and right images, which is crucial for setting the depth of objects in your scene), and edge float (also called ‘floating window’, it creates the illusion of the viewing pane moving in relation to your screen). You can also get live 3D playback of your scene in the animation window, or do a 3D anaglyph QuickTime export to share with others.

Here is the full change list:

• 3D Stereo Review: View anaglyphs, set convergence or edge float, and adjust interocular distances.
• 3D Test Shots: Take 3D test shots and use the 3D review tools to evaluate them.
• 3D Playback: Play 3D sequences using anaglyphs or transparencies in color or black and white.
• Export Stereo (3D) QuickTime: Export 3D sequences to QuickTime.
• Improved DMX Keyframe Editing: Select multiple keyframes and drag them on the timeline to change timing.
• Collapsible Cinematography Tools: Collapse tools like the Digital Densitometer or Camera Control when you’re not using them.
• Cinematography Image Export: Export still images the way they appear in the Cinematography window.
• Improved Canon EOS connection reliability.

This is a free update for all Dragon Stop Motion 2.x license owners.
Download version 2.2 from our site.

Download a free trial of Dragon Stop Motion animation software.

“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.

Watch “Dried Up”

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

Alan Poon shares his experience directing the 2008 music video “In Our Talons” for the Bowerbirds. If you missed it back in 08 Alan has just added it to his Vimeo Page. The ambitious clip features a dancing crab, black bird and two love bitten praying mantes.

“We had three different stopmo animators working on it. It was a tough but fulfilling project. I had DP’d stopmotion before, but this was really my first venture into stopmotion as a director.”

“One Dragon feature that worked out very well was the multiple exposures setting… the ‘fire mantises’ were backlit (on purpose) and we used blue card stock to cover the rigs, but the blue was way too dark to key out. We ended up doing two exposures, one for the ‘picture’ backlit, and one that was front lit for the blue card. In post we could grab our matte from one channel and apply it to the other, it worked out great.”

“The crew was small and very hard working. My friend and collaborator, Adam Makarenko who built the sets and DP’d, had to leave town for a job, so I was left to manage on my own. During those last weeks, I was working on average 15-16 hour days on set, having to spark up the sets in the morning so they were warm for animation (to avoid massive set shifts) and then strike everything in the evening and backup all the footage for the day. But there’s something so magical about stopmotion… I’d usually go home and watch the footage a bunch of times and then start rig removal before I went to bed!”

Here is what one of the animators, Sylvie Trouve had to say about the project:

“It was great working with the director Alan Poon; I loved his vision behind the video. He was great in that he respects and trusts the animators he works with; being open to their collaboration and giving them room to play. It’s not often you get a chance to make a crow dance as if he was a russian ballet dancer. The puppets were also extremely well done and great to work with and the song of course was great to work to; i must of listened to it a thousand times. It’s hard to pick a favorite shot, i love so many of the landscape, the crow changing feathers, the crab curling up etc. Working with Dragon made my life so much simpler as an animator, its a good stable program, easy to use with a nice interface. It’s like eating at a restaurant with good lighting.”

Click here to watch ‘Bowerbirds, In Our Talons’

LovoFilm and Oliver Babinet created this enchanting spot for Natural Gas in Belgium. Using knit wool to envelop and transform a home, Oliver and his team of stop motion animators have created the perfect visual metaphor for coziness.

We got the inside story from one of the three animators, Eric Parizeau. Eric informed us that the spot used a mix of Canon 5D MkII stills and 35mm footage shot with an Arriflex. It’s great to see how well the footage cut together.

With only two days to test before the shoot, the animators used Dragon Stop Motion to run through the shots and help plan the timing and logistics. On the shoot, they used the Canon 5D with Dragon for shots that did not require live action elements. Film was used for shots with live interaction. The film camera would be switched from single frame mode for animation and then to running speed for live. The live and stop motion were composited in post.

Eric is a big fan of the Canon 5D Mkll / Dragon Stop Motion combo.

“Dragon on a Mac with the Canon 5D, makes the greatest team!”

-Eric Parizeau

Check out the Making Of.

La Moustache just posted a music video they worked on for recording artist Krista Muir and director Kara Blake, Concrete Lovesong. With beautiful lighting and delicate animation, Concrete Lovesong invites you into a handcrafted miniature world.

Dale Hayward had this to say about using DSM 2.0:

“We exclusively use Dragon for our stop-mo projects. it’s such a fantastic program, you’ve helped give stop-mo filmmakers the perfect setup, merci.”

music & lyrics by Krista Muir
director: Kara Blake
DOP: Dean Holmes
animators: Dale Hayward & Sylvie Trouvé
art director: Corinne Merrell
producers: Philippe Gariépy, Pierre-Aleandre Bouchard La Guerilla

2009

Make sure to check out the behind-the-scenes video to see how they did it all.

The animation director, Cameron Clark, contacted us to let us know how well Dragon Stop Motion software worked for the project:

Dragon was absolutely essential to the success of the video. We were able to take my After Effects pre-visualizations and lay them down as a “line-up video” for real-time references to make sure all of our movements came out smooth and to the beat. This way, I could hand off a reference video to a team of animators to do the physical movements while I was free to work on the next shot’s pre-animation, knowing that they could use Dragon to basically trace my work. This way we got the smoothness of digital animation combined with the charm of physical stop-motion.

Sure beats having to plan it all by hand and sit behind the physical animators to make sure their tweening is consistant. With Dragon, we were able to do a 4 minute music video with almost 3,000 still photos in less than a month, counting pre-production. The workflow really was a dream.

Click here to watch the music video.
Click here to watch the behind-the-scenes video.

The titles are currently featured at The Art of the Title Sequence, where Johnny Kelly provides a lot of behind-the-scenes details on the production process.

The sequences were shot at Clapham Road Studios, a studio in London that specializes in stop motion animation. Director of photography Matthew Day shot with Dragon Stop Motion software and has used it on numerous projects there.

Click here to watch the opening titles.
Click here to watch the end titles.