People like a bit of stop frame, but there's not much of it about.
I mean, the skills base is very tiny.
There aren't many of us who do this. The people
who do what I do, it is probably 5.
You don't sign up for a Wes Anderson movie thinking you're gonna
make anything other than a Wes Anderson movie. I mean, that is how it is.
He's trusting me to deliver what what he wants, so I have to totally get inside
that mindset and deliver that, even if in another environment with another
director that would be a completely different process.
In fact, what he's really after is to achieve as much as possible in camera,
so things that we're very much used to solving by using visual effects,
post-production, we're now going back to where we were perhaps 30 years ago and
creating those effects onset in front of the camera, so all those organic things
that are very difficult to do in animation, such as rain and smoke and
fire and fog- in anything that has organic movement to it - is very difficult
to make as an animated element because that very organic quality is very
difficult to produce, so you have to find ways of doing that.They very
deliberately have a handmade feel to them, so it's it's it's kind of
resurrecting old techniques. Typically we're making fog out of cotton
wool and we're making water out of cling film, and it's just finding ways to get
those materials to behave in a realistic fashion.
We typically shoot on any of these productions for the thick end of two
years, and we would be shooting with anything up to fifty units. We've got
50 cameras running, 50 sets simultaneously. As in all movies there
are 24 frames per second at normal running rate. The animator goes on to
the set with their puppets. If they pose up the first frame, then they take a frame
and then they move it, and take another frame.
It's how you manipulate that timing.
If a puppet is pausing,
then you can't afford to take more than one frame at once.
In terms of how long it takes; have you got one puppet standing there blinking or have you got
70 chickens waving their arms in the air screaming, something like we had on
'Chicken Run' for instance, you know, that obviously takes weeks compared with
a blinking puppet that might take a couple of hours, so what's going on is
also the question, really. I've got top-down view of 50 units.
I'm physically lighting with my gaffer. I'm physically
lighting maybe 15 of those units. I can't conceivably light 50, there's just
not enough hours of the day, so I have another two three guys who are lighting
to my brief, but I see every frame that comes of every unit. And I see every
light my test because I need to make sure that that movie looks like one hand
made it. My hand.
In terms of shooting stop frame there are challenges which you are not
presented with in the live-action world. Most of my best fixes for Wes
revolve around depth of field, which is never enough.
His live action movies are all shot on super wide lenses with humans at sensible
distances and that's what he wants his animation films to look like and it's
often tricky to catch them at that point. The main issue is the size of what
you're shooting, so everything you're shooting is very very close to the
camera, so if you're doing a close-up, instead of your actor being six feet
from the camera - your puppet, your actor is going
to be six inches from camera,
and this compromises what you can do hugely with your lenses because you're working
right down at the minimum focus end or even into the macro end of a lens, and
that makes a huge difference to the depth of field and the depth of focus
that you have available to you. When I've got a puppet right up to the minimum
point of the lens, if I'm at f-16 or f-22 I might just about have full focus from
nose to ear and everything else is mush, so if you want more depth of field that
becomes a challenge. Then you have to find ways of making your lenses work
slightly differently or making the way you shoot different, so that you can
achieve that depth of look that you would expect if that puppy was six feet high.
I mean, there are ways and means, and we have in extremes,
we've we've shot the puppet's foreground on green and then taking the puppet away
and rephotographed the background and then put put the two together.
We do occasionally use the lens much further back, so the shot is actually smaller
than you'd expect, which gives you better depth of field because the puppet is
further from the lens, and then we can punch in on that digitally
because we do have the resolution on a chip in order to do that.
We were using the Canon 1DX. We went through a funny, rigorous testing process
at the beginning of the job, which is something that we find ourselves having
to do at the beginning of every job now because since we have segwayed from
shooting on 35mm to shooting on digital stills cameras, what we've got
is sort of an upward curve of quality and development in the stills camera world
to choose from. We tested a six cameras very rigorously and that's not just
about how the camera performs normally, it's how the camera performs over time
because we keep the live view switched on almost constantly, because that is the
image that the animator works to, so we're quite often forcing the camera to
stay forcing the camera to stay open, so the live view is on constant feed, and
that can have a very deleterious effect on the chip.
The 1DX was a significant improvement, and we had very very little problem with the chip.
It was super stable under temperature variation and it didn't suffer from
being forced as lively all the time, and that was the reason we picked that
camera because it's super solid - which is so important for us. It saves us hours
and hours of time, and the other reason we went with it
is because it interfaces very well with our software dragon frame, which is the
now the industry standard image grabbing software that we use in
animation and you can literally plug and play the 1DX
into that without having to fiddle about with it too much. So all these things
just make our life it's simpler.
How did I get started in stop-motion? Entirely by accident, actually.
I have been out of film school for a few years and I was shooting some pop promos,
and I knew some people at Aardman and I rang them to borrow some lights, and Aardman at
that point was literally three men and a dog. Three men, a woman and a dog, and
they were intensely laid-back, and they went; "oh, are you doing anything
next week?", and I went; "No" - and I went along. I was 25, and there I was shooting a
35mm commercial. When you start your career, you're absoluteyl desperate to
do stuff, and within three years I was shooting' The Wrong Trousers'.
And it sort of took off from there. I actually approached the producer on 'Fantastic Mr. Fox'
before I really knew Wes at all. In fact, I didn't really know about Wes.
I was strangely in front of his works at that point but I had heard that they
were setting up a stop frame production in London, and so I went to see the producer
and showed him my reel, and I think she showed my reel to Wes,
and I consequently got the job.
My relationship with Wes is now entirely trust based. I would say he
trusts me to do what he wants to do and that's very important for both of us.
I'm his backstop in terms of visuals I think. The way you photograph
something, the way you frame something, or the way you light something should be
as beautiful as you can make it - so it's not a bit flat, might go
home - its proper photography, its proper cinematography. We make as few
concessions as we can to the limitations of our space and depth of field.