Elizabeth Hobbs Talk
'I'm OK' (2017)
Going to her talk was very useful because I too want to go down the route of stop-motion animation. It was very insightful seeing how she worked and she tended to work in a very similar way to me. For her works 'The Last Regret of the Grim Reaper' (1998), 'The Emperor' (2001) and 'I'm OK' (2017), she employed a 'trial and error' way of working, where around half the animation she produced ended up getting scrapped. In fact, for 'I'm OK', she produced 45 minutes of work, which ended up being edited down to 8 minutes of film. With this trial and error style of working, she also never produces any storyboards plans, in a similar way to me where I find storyboarding an unnatural way of working. Despite this, her work still has clear direction and that's down to the music she has made before even beginning to animate, as was done with 'I'm OK'. I agree with this way of working as it can bring about a lot of inspiration, which can often be lost through over-planning a project. Additionally this was my favourite of her animations, of which the music here had a prominent role.
'The Emperor' (2001)
The animated watercolours was something I hadn't particularly considered trying before but is something I'd like to explore. Unlike with puppet animating, this process seems to leave less chance for mistakes. In her early work, she would apply watercolours to the same piece of paper instead of replacing the page every frame. I like the muddying, unclear look this achieves by the end of each scene. These were what the pages looked like once she finished animating a scene:
She also animates very quickly, often not even allowing the paint to dry before taking a photo and moving onto the next frame, which in itself creates a nice effect, giving the paint a nice shine to it. It is this speed of working that allows for trial and error to come in as, time-wise, it is not a great loss to her if something doesn't work out the way she intended it to. I work again in a similar way, not getting sentimental about the work, and so I don't have issues with editing out parts.
Jennie Pedley Talk
As part of the Employability Week, Jennie did a talk on her work, which combines the subjects of science, anthropology and art together. I was intrigued by her work, in particular her 'Lockdown Landscape' Exhibition from 2020. As I'm interested in stop-motion background construction, these landscapes were particularly appealing.
When I asked her specifically about them, she said they were made purely as a result of lockdown - she was frustrated by her inability during this time to work in the community or to enter competitions/ exhibitions. The materials she used were ones collected from the local woods, from which she was able to create these islands. The photos of the covid-19 microbe were the starting inspiration for these miniature works, an inspiration that is particularly evident in the middle piece of work.
Ben Waddleton
Ben is an alumnus of Leeds Arts Uni and also studied animation. I was interested in his talk as he now focuses on stop-motion animation. His journey was very interesting as it has always been animation-related and he has never had to go into part-time work for instance to help fund his animation work. His first job involved teaching After Effects and Photoshop to people online. After a year of this, Vine had started to get popular and here he would create a 7 second animation per day and eventually, this got him more and more of an audience. It got to a point when Vine and Twitter wanted him to start making 7 second adverts for them, allowing him to be as creative as he wanted with the content. Now he works on a lot of stop-motion toy adverts, for example Hot Wheels, Barbie and Smyths Toys Superstore.
His main tips were:
- Jump at any new social media platform that comes along. A platform such as TikTok is already too old but it won't be long until the next platform becomes the next big thing
- Large companies who want adverts will often offer a budget to an animator and the animator usually has to say what they can get done for them with that budget before working on anything
- Working to a budget will come with experience (eg. travel expenses are often a forgotten expenditure)
- Keep making work for yourself as it can improve your skill and also be added to your showreel
- Specialise in something that not many other people can do
- The work hours are often 7 days a week with unusual working hours
Mike Wyeld
Mike is a sound designer and film score composer. This was a very informative lecture about the different types of sound that are present in film, and the stages that sound goes through before being the finished product of a film. There are 3 stages to sound production. The first stage is recording the sound/collecting the sound from archives. The second stage is editing and manipulating the sound. The final stage is mixing and outputting the sound, where the soundtrack is complete, (the soundtrack being the sounds you intentionally add to a film).
Intentional sound is a main category of sound. It can be split into literal sound, which mimics the sound that would be produced by the object that is on screen (it helps us believe what we are seeing). The other sub-category is emotive sounds and these are sounds not produced by any objects in the film, but rather any sounds that direct how we feel about the object on screen.
Sound is often argued to be the most important part of film. Silence is even more important as it insinuates that the object on screen is significantly profound and needs the complete attention of the audience.
I found this lecture particularly interesting as I am very interested in music and I'm looking to work closely with both animation and music in the future. It is clear that music and sound bare a huge influence over film.
Matthew Cooper
Matthew is a stop-motion animator and director who specialises in camera effects, playing with scale and works on music videos/adverts. He's worked on adverts for Reebok, a short film called 'The Fantastical Factory of Curious Craft', and an advert for Gudberg Nerger (which was my favourite of his work). This advert featured the letters of the company being represented one at a time in semaphore, and Matthew revealed how the animation was made using replacement animation with laser cut characters from MDF. MDF is a good material to work with as it's very cheap. He revealed about 90% of the stuff that is produced for films gets binned after it is no longer needed, so this waste can get expensive.
He also gave us insight into the process that goes behind making his work, with the example of 'The Fantastical Factory of Curious Craft'. It starts with a brief, then storyboarding/concept art, followed by 3D digital plans and finally the plans are built in real life.
What Went Well
- The range of speakers gave a range of insights into how they worked and what they were working on despite nearly all of them still regarding their work as stop-motion animation
- It was interesting to see how similarly I worked to Elizabeth Hobbs with regards to planning and using trial and error
- Ben Waddleton's lecture was interesting as he studied the same course at the same uni and is also focused on stop-motion. This lecture brought my focus back to how the next stage of finding work is not that far away. He gave good advice on preparing for this next stage
- The lecture on sound closely follows the direction I want to go with my work in the future, linking music and animation.
Criticism
- Due to these lectures being held over zoom, it was quite hard to see the visitor's animation pieces without it being choppy however I could get the gist
- Not all the lectures were related to stop-motion. Jennie Pedley isn't an animator, however it was just as inspiring to see how she developed art in her own field
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