[Cheery music]
[Butler] Shooting on ones is essentially shooting
24 frames a second.
If you shoot on twos, then you take a picture
for every two frames, so it's 12 frames a second.
These parameters have been in place for animation forever,
even when I first started out, which was a long time ago.
In 2D animation, there was a —
you talk about twos or singles.
Certainly, from Coraline onwards, we wanted to
animate on singles 99% of the time,
because I think we are aspiring towards
what Disney used to call "the illusion of life,"
and that's figurative animation, naturalistic animation.
There are all different types of animation.
You can animate pose to pose, you can animate
straight to head, you can have
animation that's a little more rough and ready...
They're all different aesthetics
and you can choose to use them.
We choose to try and get the most
fluid, nuanced performances possible.
That's why we shoot on ones.
Having said that, there are occasions
where twos are in order.
If a character is moving so negligibly that you can't
physically move it on ones, then you can move it on twos.
If a character's very, very far away from camera,
so the movements are so tiny on the screen,
then you can shoot on twos.
But essentially, we chase the singles
because it's a more fluid,
more sophisticated, more nuanced look.
"Put this on."
[Thwack]
[Soft, plucky music]
[Whispering] "Hey, Sir Lionel. Sorry, do you have a size bigger?
I think I put a run in it."
[Butler] A lot of stop-motion is shot on twos.
I mean, some people shoot on fours.
Again, it's an aesthetic choice.
Aardman does a lot of twos, but that's
part of their signature, you know?
And that speaks to the look of the thing.
Like, on Aardman, they purposefully replicate
the thumbprints of the animator on a figure,
even though those days are long gone.
There is no — they're not made out of clay.
They're not sculpted anymore, but they still include that
because it gives it a look.
And I think twos is part of that.
It's a choice, in the end.
"You can speak?"
"Yes, and, um, I write as well.
My penmanship isn't great, but, uh, you know...
Opposable thumbs and... [exhales]
fat fingers, you know?" [Chuckles]
[Butler] I think what makes stop-motion special is that
it is real lights on real objects.
These are handmade things. There is a tactility to that
that is beautiful, that goes all the way back to
your childhood and the idea of your toys coming alive.
When you watch something stop-motion, I think you —
you feel like you can reach into the screen and touch it.
That's in the very DNA of this medium.
You can't take that away.
You can use technology to push the medium forward —
you can tell bolder stories, bigger stories, bigger scopes,
bigger scale — you can have bigger sets, more characters,
but in the end, stop-motion is what it is.
And I think the idea of advancing
any animation towards this goal of ultimate realism —
I don't necessarily think that's true.
"I give you my word."
"Okay, what is it?"
"What?"
"Your word."
"It's a figure of speech."
"Sounds good. What is it?"
[Butler] Photorealism, that's the pursuit of some people.
But for a lot of people, it's not, and I think
what a lot of people — that a lot of people's ambition,
in both CG animation and stop-motion animation,
is just to use technology to enable them to
do more with the medium.
It doesn't change the aesthetic.
I know plenty of people who work in CG animation, and
they're doing the opposite of chasing realism.
They're chasing, you know, something that's more
radically stylized, or more absurd.
And I think, again, it comes down to:
what do you want the final product to look like?
We use technology to accentuate.
We use technology to aid us
to tell more complicated stories,
but we will never use technology to
replace the medium that we love.