Puppet Animation.

I have been looking into puppet animation as I think this is the road I am going to take.

The first I looked at was Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas is a 1993 stop motion fantast film directed by Henry Selick and produced/co-written by Tim Burton.

This was beautiful to watch. The techniques they used were amazing and so life like. The walking and the character's movements looked so authentic and natural looking, really impressive.

Another puppet animation I looked at for inspiration was the recent stop motion horror fantasy film Coraline. Also another one of Henry Selick's pieces. Based on Neil Gaiman's novel of the same name.

The story is amazing and it looks great, but I think there is too much 3D in this film to help me with my puppet animation.

The last puppet animation I looked at for stimulus was Robot chicken.

It is an American stop motion animated television series created and produced by Seth Green and Matthew Senreich along with co-Head Writers Douglas Goldstein and Tom Root.

It is very funny and they send up alot of popular films and well known cartoon characters. They use toys, action figures, dolls and claymation to create their animations. Which has given me an idea for my animation, I want to use two action figures as my characters. I will take photos of their movements to use for my stop motion animation.

Nick Park Interview

I seen a brilliant interview with Nick Park on BBC iPlayer, he was BBC2's Culture Show on the 19th November 2009. One of the interesting things Nick talked about was that Gromit, from Wallace and Gromit was originally suppose to speak, but they found it took up too much time and effort. So instead he took inspiration from Eddie Murphy's facial expressions in the film "Trading Places". Where Eddie plays the street hustler Billy Ray Valentine and used the same sort of expressions for Gromit.

It was great to hear the professionals worry about their abilities and time constraints too. Which got me thinking maybe I could use figures like Wallace and Gromit to do my animation rather than draw the whole thing out. So I am going to do a little bit of research on this and see how hard it would be to do.

Basic Character Drawings

Here are some of my character drawings, the book Dot dot dash : designer toys, action figures, gave me some good ideas for these.

And here are some of my character movement drawings, these were inspired from the book Lutz, Edwin George, b. 1868. - Animated cartoons : how they are made.

I also finalised the dialogue for my animation and used the book Blair, Preston. - Cartoon animation, to help me draw out the lip syncing for that.

Unfortunately when I was doing the character movement drawings I realised if I want my character to even just walk across the room it will take at least 18 drawings. Drawing is my weakness so I am worried that my drawing ability will effect the creation of my animation, as I don't think I can draw fast enough to draw the whole animation out in time. I don't know where to go from here.

Character Development

I have also started work on my character development, I found this book from the Library helpful for that.