Animation Forum West Midlands

CR: There is an enormous play factor involved in stop-motion, and I think in a different way there is an enormous play factor in CGI as well, although you have to be technically intuitive in different ways for each. I guess the main difference with CGI though, is there are two arms to it (in my mind anyway), firstly there is CGI that aspires to generate photo-real images that would move in real-time and space as if they were there in front of you (e.g. King Kong, Transformers). So if you were there looking at this twenty foot robot, it would move in a certain way that you would expect or imagine it to. And that's very different from the character animation you see coming out of Pixar, which is basically creating three-dimensional cartoons. There's a very important difference, and I think that's where you take it for granted when you see something that you know isn't actually there in front of the camera, it's quite easy to dismiss it a little bit. It's fantastic to see but I get a bit desensitised to it. I find my appreciation level diminishes a bit when I take it for granted that things are computer generated. Whereas if you see something that looks tangible, looks like it's been painted by hand, looks like the puppets are actually real, I can understand the labour involved a little more. I suppose between the two schools there's more obvious differences, the one big difference being gravity. In CGI, (I imagine) you can have a character run, jump, zoom, fly at whatever speed in a very non-linear fashion, it's a very non-linear form of animating. Whereas stop-motion is a very linear, analogue form of animating. I think the problems that you have to overcome in stop-motion are still more difficult than CGI, but that's only because I don't know how to do CG yet! Whatever medium you use, I guess the same basic principles of animation apply, like the correct weighting of a puppet; whether it's CG or 'real,' if the movement is wrong, you can normally tell.

NH: Actually somebody said to us, that stop-frame doesn't age like CGI does. It was Hugh Welchman, the producer of Peter and the Wolf, he mentioned that CGI ages because of advances in technology. Every couple of years you've got something new, like a new texture, or this, that, and the other that advances how it looks. So if you look at CGI animation that was done say five years ago, it looks old and slightly tired. Whereas stop-motion has a longer shelf life, and can look good for longer.

CR: I think in that respect, it can have more of a timeless quality to it, and to be honest with you, what keeps me interested in it is that a) we're playing to our strengths and b) there is still a big welcome for it in audiences' minds. You still see adverts that are done in stop-motion, even from the simpler techniques of object animation like the recent Innocent ad's, to the really lush-looking Lux advert. And there's still so much stuff flying around on the Internet and TV on YouTube that's done traditionally. There's still a big appreciation for it.

NH: In feature films as well, The Corpse Bride and Curse of the Ware Rabbit. CGI wasn't the death of stop-frame animation, in fact people were really interested in CG for a while and it's sort of levelling out at the moment, because people see the advantages of the different techniques; you cannot replicate one with the other.

CR: It doesn't really change the fact that whatever technique you use, you still need to write a good story. Before you put anything in front of a camera, you need to have worked out exactly it is that you're saying, whether it be 10 minutes or 90. I find myself reacting a bit indifferently to CG when the story doesn't engage you or the human characters, if there are any, annoy you!

NH: People have a habit of jumping on a bandwagon and because CG keeps improving, people assume that whatever they're producing will automatically be great, and that's not the case at all. As Chris said, a good animation is based on a good story; if you don't have a good story to begin with you're not going to have a good animation at the end. It doesn't matter how beautiful it is, how well lit it is, how well animated it is, because if there's no story, people are not going to be able to relate to it.

CR: It becomes animation for animation's sake.

NH: Exactly, and that's a really, really bad place to be because it's pointless, and you have to work twice as hard on the animation to make it almost work!

Generally, what inspires you?

CR: I think it's got to be having an interesting story to tell, and a good visual starting point. Also, I think it's nice to make a film reflect the times in which it was made, be it subtly or very overtly. The next idea I'm working on at the minute has got an anti-war cloud hanging over the story, whereas The Animal Book was about what was going on around us in terms of the city. However, that was crafted, we didn't want to make the film a bit of a placard, we just weaved it into the design a little bit, kept it in mind and had a springboard to project our ideas I suppose.

NH: As much as animating for animating's sake is dangerous, so is story-telling for story-telling's sake. You've got to have a reason for telling it in the first place.

CR: It's very easy as animators I think to get into…

NH: …Geek mode!

CR: Yeah, you'll be on a shot and then go, "Oh I can make him just do that [strikes a pose with his hands] and it'll look so nice." It's nice to be spontaneous but I'm always conscious of there being a point to every little detail. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

NH: From my point of view, a lot of 2D animators are very influential, as well as the environment around me. I like sketching, I keep crazy sketchbooks and love characters, and I'm quite a big people watcher, as I suppose quite a lot of us are. But yeah, 2D animators like Michaël Dudok de Wit for example, just because of his amazing motion, and getting characteristics and mannerisms into characters. As an animator, you have to have a number of strings to your bow, you've got to understand 3D space and you've got to understand story-telling; because even if you're animating and not writing you're still telling a story through the images. So it's good to take inspiration from as many different places as you can in order to build up an understanding of a certain environment and way of telling a story. It's just important to keep your eyes open and take in what's going on around you really.

CR: Music as well is quite a good one. I think you can get really inspired or fired up by a good piece of music and imagine a really nice world playing along with it.

NH: And animation and music work really well together anyway, because they're both based on timing and pace, so that works really well in exaggerations, crescendo's, visuals as well as music, they go really nicely together.

CR: It was really nice working with Arnie Somogyi and Rob Townsend of Voodookazoo on this as well. They did an absolutely stunning job. Initially, they admitted that they were very much inspired towards a Danny Elfman style by the visuals we'd created and it worked a treat. In the past, the only music that I had animated to had been composed in a commercial scenario, so it can be quite jingle-ley if you're doing promos and stuff. It's doing a job, but in this case we could…

NH: …Go a bit deeper, a bit more intense.

CR: Yeah, it felt like it had a bit more substance to it really. It wasn't just a clipped thirty second theme, it was this rolling soundscape. It was just so, so nice what they did that it was really rewarding. The same goes for Matt Hale as well who did the sound design. We just gave them a brief and let them run with it, and then when they came back with what they'd done, we were blown away. It brought a whole different dimension to the film.

NH: It's incredible. It was really great in that I had worked with Alan and Rob previously, so to bring them back onto another project was great. Music's something that is quite close to my heart and Chris's as well, and when I'm making a film I'm always concerned who I give music to. It's so important to a film to have people there you can trust, that you know are gonna do a bang-up job. So it's nice to know there are people there who are really intuitive about how to make visuals and sound work. Music is just a massive part of any film, massive, so well done them!

CR: The whole film surpassed our expectations, a massive amount of sacrifice and effort was made on the part of a very small number of people to bring it all together. I thought it would just be a handful of us just muddling through it and getting it to a certain point where we were happy with it, but as soon as people got wind of what we were trying to do, they really wanted to be involved.

NH: Most people would come in for a weekend or two and say, "Can we animate for you?"

CR: We told them we couldn't afford to pay them but they'd say, "I don't care, this is great, I've never seen anything like this before, brilliant."

NH: Judd was sleeping on that futon [the one this reporter is currently perched on] for three consecutive weekends.

CR: Yeah! Dale came down in the week and then we kind of worked it in a shift way, but come Friday, me, Tilley, Jon and Ian were feeling kind of knackered. Then Jud would come down from Manchester with Dale, and they'd come into it on the weekend and be slightly fresher. I thought it was amazing how everyone's enthusiasm stayed on an even peak the whole time.

NH: Especially doing such crazy hours. We had a fantastic team.

CR: They were great. Jud would have a working week, then we'd have a stage ready for him, he'd work Friday night then just crash out early Saturday morning. He'd get up Saturday morning and they'd be another set ready for him, he spent three weekends just working and crashing here in the studio, he absolutely loved it.

NH: There is a story about the futon anyway, because the amount of people who would have an hour's snooze, then go back downstairs, finish animating and come back up and… [Tilley mimics a loud snore].

CR: One of the first things me and Jim [partner in Second Home] agreed to buy when we were setting up here was a sofa-bed! In the past I've crashed on sheets of polystyrene and I'm not doing that ever again!

And who knows, if The Animal Book gets half the recognition it deserves, maybe Second Home Studios will be taking more shopping trips to Ikea. Tune in next time folks for a feature on Wolverhampton's very own 3D animation and CGI extraordinaires: SCREENBURN.
DA