Maya has been working as a Director’s Assistant at Exit Films Melbourne for the past three years. In her spare time she likes making animation, learning music, drawing, other crafty type activities, joking around, and in particular, dreaming about living inside a French art movie.
She studied Creative Arts at Melbourne Uni followed by a stint in Post at Digital Pictures. After that she spent 3 years in London working on commercials, music videos and features at RSA/Black Dog before returning to Melbourne in 2007 and very briefly studying multimedia at RMIT. She has traveled to Mexico, Morocco, Japan, L.A, New York, London and Europe.
Her favorite animators are Yori Nurstein, Jan Svankmajer, and the Brothers Quay.
“Did That Move?” is a short animation produced as part of an jewellery exhibition in a gallery space. Here Maya takes us step by step through the technical process of creating this work.
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THE COMMISSION:
Pieces of Eight Gallery and Dougal Haslem wanted me to make a stop motion animation using Dougal’s amazing objects and jewellery. He makes these fantastic creature-like objects using found materials and gold and silversmithing processes, that although not motorized, have articulated parts that can be moved. The finished animation was to be included in an exhibition of Dougal’s work at the beautiful Pieces of Eight city gallery at the beginning of 2011, and used in some of their publicity for the show. I’d never really made a proper stop motion animation, but I was up for the challenge.
- THE IDEA:
Initially I thought I would do something quite minimalist and graphic; using maybe only the pieces themselves against a white or very plain background. But the gallery director Melanie Katsalidis suggested I go and have a look at Dougal’s studio and see what the space inspired. Once I’d visited his wonderful studio space, I wanted to include it in the animation, as the background or context for the story, which plays with the idea that all of these personality-filled objects have an independent life of their own, and come alive in secret.
- THE SHOOT:
I shot the animation over several weekends, with the help of two animator friends, Haydn Kwan and Elin Soderlund. They each brought something completely different to the animation. Among loads of other things, Haydn has a great sense of character, and Elin brought a very creative attention to detail in movement.
I used a Canon DSLR EOS 5D borrowed from Exit Films, and an 18mm Canon lens because the pieces were so tiny,(some of them a bit bigger than a 10 cent coin!). I tried to keep the F-stop fairly consistent, although I had to make a bit of a compromise because while I like shallow depth of focus in stop motion, it also makes it hard to see any animation going on anywhere else in frame that isn’t in focus. The Brothers Quay seem to be really brilliant with this. I can only hope I will get my head around it a bit better next time.
The lights were actually just ordinary domestic lights, although I did replace all of the bulbs so that thery were all fresh and had the same colour temperature (daylight). I also used a truck load of blutack, mainly to keep all of the objects that were’t supposed to be moving steady.
It would be great to try animating camera moves too in future. I did include a stop motion focus pull (I think about 2 frames for each increment), but everything else is focus pull free and locked off on a tripod (probably a good idea for someone new to stop motion).
I hooked the camera up to my MacBook Pro and shot the whole thing frame by frame via Dragon Stop Motion. The main advantage of using this program was that we could onion skin, meaning, that we could shoot a frame and then set up for the next using the previous frame shot as a semi opaque reference layered over the top.
Below a screen grab of the Dragon Stop Motion interface
I shot it all straight ahead, with only a rough idea of where I was headed, although I did rough out a series of shots on paper at the start of each shoot day. I did it this way because I hate over planning, I think it kills my creativity. I like to be able to respond spontaneously to what is on location on the day.
I shot in doubles not singles, meaning, instead of shooting 1 frame for each animated movement, I shot 2 frames. I did that because it was a faster way of working. Purist animators who had more time to work on a project would probably shoot on singles, because the movement is a lot smoother.
The 5D set up worked really well with Dragon Stop Motion, although I did have a few flicker issues. From what I can gather, ideally you would use a Canon 5D body, and something called a Novoflex adapter with older manual Nikon lenses. These lenses apparently have a manual aperture ring which stops the flicker created by using non-manual lenses. Next time I would definitely try to work this way, as the flicker problem caused a few long, frustrating delays.
- EDIT:
So when it came to the edit, it was pretty much all there. Although, I did swap around a couple of shots at the very start, and slow down and speed up here and there. I used After Effects to edit, because I like that I could layer all of the frames. It seemed to offer more control over detail than something like Final Cut.
I had to import all of the frames as stills, as a frame sequence, which is very straightforward to do in After Effects. You can specify how long (how many frames) you’d like each still to go for, and then it imports and distributes them all along in a sequence.
- SOUND DESIGN:
Darren Ballingal very kindly did all of the sound, and I think he did a fantastic job. I don’t know what software or processes he used. The only brief I gave him was something like “Hello, you don’t know me but can you please create a playful, wind up toy, clockworkish soundtrack for my animation?”. I really think he saved the day actually.
- GRADING:
Desaturated a little using an adjustment layer in After Effects.
- COMPLETION:
I exported it as an uncompressed Quicktime movie, which was kind of my master. From there I created a web version (mp4) and also a playable DVD (to be played in the gallery window) using DVD Studio Pro.
Check the finished production out at