How Stop-Motion Movies Are Animated at Aardman | WIRED

Key Takeaways

[Music] the new netflix film robin robin pushes the envelope of what's possible with stop-motion animation and follows in the creative footsteps of classic aardman films like wallace and gromit shauna the sheep and chicken run the symbiosis with technology has massively helped we're able to do things now with stop-motion that you know wouldn't have been possible not so long ago the film's young directing duo championed new textures and new visual effect techniques while staying true to the artisanal spirit of aardman studios the robin robin world is all handcrafted every snowflake in it has been shot in camera hand animated so we didn't want any cg in the film let's break down the timeline and the technique of the new stop-motion aardman flick the whole production took about two years from when we were kind of green lit to when we finally delivered the final film probably about a year of that was uh writing and storyboarding from the script the film went through the prep and design phases before any puppets were built out of needle felt the characters were crafted on paper and there's no undo button on the set of a handmade film like this so dan and mikey had to get their story straight with a rigorous pre-production regimen that took nearly an entire year one thing that we did right from the beginning was to make a color script of the whole film to kind of use color to help tell in the story you've got to know exactly what you're doing when you get in the room and start filming with an animator you know you've got to know exactly to the second what you're going to shoot because of that it means that you effectively make a rough version of the film before you go on to set before you even start shooting that version we call it an animatic it's made from storyboards and edited together with like scratch sound and music and we'd often do like the voices of the characters if we hadn't recorded them by then so you kind of get this rough impression of what the film is going to be like i think we had initially sort of eight eight months to build that animatic because of the nature of stop-motion you need to be shooting scenes all at once so that required crafting at least five different puppets of each character in at least three different scales so that's 75 puppets including nine robins 11 magpies 20 mice 4 cats 4 squirrels 3 frogs and 3 hedgehogs our job on a day-to-day basis was so much fun of going into all these different rooms with like different parts of the world being rendered at different stages and pretty much every set was sort of built specifically for a particular set of shots the art department are busy the whole time kind of crafting the next set that's sort of the tradition of stop-motion sets is that they're always able to break apart and move around partially because you've got to get animators into the set here's dan mapping out the path of one of the characters blocking the action much like on a live action set the sort of blocking process was a really important part of of sort of being able to figure out exactly what you're going to get at the end of the shot because with stop-motion you know it's very hard to do a retake because it takes we weren't really allowed on this project because of the schedule once the set's in place you then uh have the process of you have the rigors there's a huge rigging department that there's a lot of scaffolding that kind of goes into moving these puppets around and then we have the camera department which was led by our incredible dop dave alex riddick who is the the dop on the wrong trousers and there's a huge uh tradition of making films at admin and he would then light the set so you know he would paint with light um so there's lots and lots of cameras set up and lots of lighting preparation that goes in then before the animator is finally able to step up to the stage and then we had about an eight month shooting window so we filmed for eight months a team of 14 animators each banked about eight seconds of footage per week we don't shoot anything sequentially well one shot in particular it was a big shot and a big set piece of the film which is robin's song right at the beginning of the film where she kind of dances her way through their rubbish dump home it was a pretty long shot like over 20 seconds and also involved the camera move and a lot of choreography there was a lot of puppets in it probably took about a week to set up the motion control and get the camera working right after that you'd have like all the lighting tweaks which took probably another few days or maybe a week and then once the animator's ready they'll come in and for that particular shot he did a block which took him about a week that whole one shot was probably like five weeks in one unit so you've got to make sure that that camera move is right and that it's not going too fast and it's going to leave them behind so he was in there every day for two weeks animating this sequence we just sort of like locked him in there came back in two weeks and he'd made this absolute masterpiece [Music] the fundamental basics of stop-motion have probably remained the same for a hundred years which you have something you move it a little bit take a picture move it a little bit take a picture move it a little bit so there's 12 frames per second so 12 images every second are taken as an animator they've got this great ability to plan things out very meticulously but also capture like a real kind of spontaneous energy we had this process where we would take each shot and act it out ourselves and when you can like act little moments out yourself there's sort of like a really immediate nature to to that you take that video reference and when you brief the animator on the floor before they they film it so we we actually do have a version of the whole film with pretty much just me and mikey acting out every character in it which is is sort of insane but um probably for many people probably more entertaining than the finnish thing some shots would be made up of multiple multiple exposures we use a program called dragon frame which uses references we're able to use like overlay images with the camera to make sure if we're shooting multiple plates that you know this element is going to match up with this element but with the software that we've got you've got a live playback of every frame that you've taken so far so a big part of the animation process is like watching back what you filmed and kind of anticipating the next position of the character that depth you see is achieved by shooting various planes and elements such as snowflakes snow drifts and silhouettes separately on green screen which would then be composited later by a visual effects team every element in the film is something that's been filmed um rather than like making cg backgrounds or anything like that i think the most we had was 60 plates a plate being like a piece of character animation or an element or a lighting exposure and we were really inspired by like the kind of russian filmmakers like in the in the early years of stop motion like yuri norstein and his like a film of hedgehog in the fog where you get this really like incredible sense of of depth and atmosphere if you if you saw how it was done it would be done in quite a low fire way really the team used a stereoscopic technique of shooting two frames at slightly different angles at once in order to capture depth that would be useful later in post so although we weren't making a 3d film what this gave us was the depth information that we wouldn't usually have with the stop motion you usually just come away from a scene with a flat image but by shooting it stereoscopic we were able to then use that depth information to embed all of our elements and so we could have raindrops passing behind blades of grass and trees disappearing into the mist and characters moving through it all without the need of green screen or rotoscoping i'm not a terrible man there was the clean up of the the neckline and the eyelids of robin our main character there's of course the the integration of all the elements the snow and the mist and the fire and the water we also um had the rigs to remove so there was the the scaffolding that upholds all these characters as they're moving along the kind of elemental build-up of things like rain was like quite complex the magic of stop-motion is is that it's all this craft kind of condensed into these frames that you're watching all together and there's a kind of magic and a sort of level of intensity to that that we we just love