September 27, 2005

Stop-Motion Animation in Corpse Bride and Wallace & Gromit

Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and the Wallace & Gromit adventure The Curse of the Were-Rabbit have brought stop-motion animation back to the big screen. With the rise of computer animation stop-motion has taken a back seat, but it's not a lost art form.

Stop-motion involves moving photographing still objects and moving them one frame at a time. A six second sequence can take a week to film. But the hands-on art form has its own charm and creates a unique visceral quality to the finished product that you don't get with hand-drawn or computer animation.

"Corpse Bride" was created using slender puppets made of rubber, with metal skeletons so intricate the filmmakers hired jewelers to help craft the tiny gears and joints. Miniature cranks in the puppets' ears control their facial movements, enabling animators to create remarkably lifelike smiles, frowns and other expressions.

The "Wallace & Gromit" characters were sculpted of clay, with metal skeletons beneath. Animators had a variety of mouths they would swap on to the characters to mimic speech, each simulating the shape of the lips for different phonetic sounds.

Posted by kevin at September 27, 2005 10:21 AM

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