The Sneaker (Stop-Motion Short)

[Nightmare Asylum]

Hello all! A few days ago I finished up a short I made for a stop-motion animation class I took over the summer. Thought I'd post it here in case any of you were interested. This is my first time doing stop-motion, so it's a little rough around the edges, but I'm pretty happy with it overall. Incredibly time consuming work, but also a ton of fun; I can't wait to get started and do more at some point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFAVWQLsdwU

[Corporal Hicks]

I wouldn't have described it as rough around the edges. I can't say there was anything in there that I thought was rough! It was fun! I liked the exaggerated sound effects - was that you?

Only thing that I think I would have benefited from some change was to change the mouth when the alien was heavy breathing.

What do you have planned for another project?

[Nightmare Asylum]

Thanks a lot man! Most of the sound effects came from online, though I recorded a few of them myself (mostly any ripping or peeling sound was me, and obviously the voiceovers.) There are a few moments where I wish I could have moved the mouth, but I didn't really get an idea on how to do so until I shot the bit with the flattened alien and the credits scene (which I think was good in theory, but the movements could have been handled a bit better).

Don't have anything specific in mind just yet, but I think for the next stop-motion I do I'd like to do it entirely stop-motion, no live action. Confine it to a small set that I build up. I'm thinking of going for something with a bit of a gothic horror vibe to it, but its gonna take a lot of planning before I really get going.

[OmegaZilla]

I think you can go next with an articulated action figure or something like that. Building armatures and stop-motion puppets is relatively easy too, on a budget.

[Nightmare Asylum]

Yeah, this one here was an armature puppet that I built, though along the way I had a few issues. The arm coming off wasn't initially in the script. If I didn't find a way to work it in, I would have lost a night of filming.




I plan on doing more puppets for my next one, and now I have a better feel for how to actually go about doing it with a few less... issues.

One of the reasons I want to do it in a set this time is so that I can hide supports underneath the puppets feet (my teacher showed me a cool way to go about doing it, building up a fake floor, putting a nut in each foot, and running a screw up through the bottom of the floor to hold the puppet in place). Because this one had to be running across actual surfaces, though, I used a support like this and then had to go in frame by frame and erase it, which was pretty time consuming work, though in the end I was pretty happy with the result.

[OmegaZilla]

When working with clay you have to build armatures so that there's wire running like a spring hugging tightly the main frame of the figure. Like this:



Obviously you leave the articulation points devoid of this 'springhugger'. Then you put clay over it; it adheres better that way.

Compositing is absurdly hard and time consuming and just plain boring considering you have to take clean plates and everything. One of my least favourite aspects of effects-making.

[Nightmare Asylum]

Thanks for that. Definitely looks a lot sturdier than the version I made (which was essentially just the wire held together with a two-part epoxy, with the joints left open in order to bend). Wish I had a pic of it without the clay...

Gonna have to give it a try like that next time!

[Corporal Hicks]

Did you ever do any films Omega?

[OmegaZilla]

Yes, but they were lost along with the PC on which they were saved. One was a short about a Bionicle fighting a clay character and I remember googling precisely how to make the armature; ended up using really cheap wires (and clay) so the whole thing was a bit short lived. Seems like aeons ago now.