Susannah Shaw - Stop Motion: Craft Skills for Model Animation, Second Edition

You want to captivate people. It doesn't come with just technique, it's about putting yourself inside that character. It's like slowing down your brain and all of a sudden you are that puppet and you move how that puppet moves.

Guionne Leroy, animator on Max & Co,
Chicken Run, Toy Story

If you want to make great animation, you need to know how to control a whole world: how to make a character, how to make that character live and be happy or sad. You need to create four walls around them, a landscape, the sun and moon a whole life for them. But it's not just playing dolls it's more like playing God. You have to get inside that puppet and first make it live, then make it perform.

Animation is animation, whatever the medium. Whether you are drawing on paper, modelling in Plasticine, shoving a couple of matchboxes around in front of a Bolex camera or animating with a computer; to become an animator you will need to understand movement and how to create emotion. You can be a cartoonist or an artist on film, a moving image maker, and there are many beautiful and hilarious examples of this, but they do not necessarily fulfil the definition of animation that this book sets out to demonstrate. This book is written for someone wanting to take the first steps in creating three-dimensional character animation.

Methods for 2D animation have been documented for a long time. Since the formation of the Disney Studios, their vast commercial output meant they had to find ways of passing on their skills to a large body of workers who needed to know the house style. The top animators started to look at what they were doing as animators, and started to identify rules and guiding principles by which they worked. Most of these principles apply to model or puppet animation as well as as they are derived from the scientific study of movement the effect of gravity, friction and force on masses. One of the greatest books to read about the development of 2D animation is Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas's The Illusion of Life (1997).

You will have seen computer animation that seems wooden and stiff or the characters glide and swoop about as though gravity never existed. This is simply because, in this relatively new medium, the majority of early practitioners were originally from a computing background and had learned the computing skills but not necessarily the animating skills. Director John Lasseter was a successful 2D animator before applying his skills to the computer-generated Tin Toy, Knick Knack and, more famously, Toy Story and Monsters Inc., giving Pixar some of the best computer-generated characters seen so far. Not everyone can handle both skills that well. Nowadays, animators are recruited to work on computer-generated films from 2D and stop motion backgrounds, and it is recognized that training for CG character animation should follow the same traditional principles of animation.

In Europe and Asia, model animation has grown out of a tradition of storytelling, fable and legend. Most practitioners developed their own ways of working in isolation, many re-inventing the wheel, but in very few cases were methods documented, and certainly no principles for model animation had been laid down in the same way as for 2D. But the basic laws of movement apply to any form of animation.

For many years Eastern Europe was the source of puppet animation; in the USA film experimentation settled more quickly to making 2D drawn animation. But in Eastern Europe there was a long tradition of puppeteering; for some, film was seen as a natural medium for the art. Puppeteers had to be able to breathe life into a jointed wooden doll in very much the same way as animators do. The design element of the puppet was very important to the storytelling process they would need to communicate a character over a distance to the whole audience. Jiri Trnka, the Czech animator, paid homage to this tradition with his beautifully made puppet films of the 1950s and 1960s, the best known of which was an adaptation of Shakespeare's