Stop motion animation is a challenging and time-consuming skill that requires patience, adaptability, and a close eye to detail. Stop Motion: Craft Skills for Model Animation, 3rd Edition, from Focal Press is the essential guide to help stop motion animators overcome these challenges of this highly-skilled craft. Author Susannah Shaw provides a step-by-step guide to creating successful stop motion films. Starting with some basic exercises, the reader will learn about developing a story, making models, creating sets and props, the mechanics of movements, filming postproduction, and how to set about finding that first elusive job in a modern studio.
- Interviews with current stars
- Step-by-step examples
- Coverage of Rapid Prototyping and Dragonframe Software
Playing God
Chapter 2
Getting Equipped
Chapter 3
Getting Animated
Chapter 4
Keep it Simple - Developing your Story
Chapter 5
Coat-hangers or Armatures - making your own model
Chapter 6
Advanced Modelmaking
Chapter 7
Four walls and a sky - Sets and props
Chapter 8
Sound Advice - The voice track
Chapter 9
The mechanics of movement
Chapter 10
The performance
Chapter 11
Under the lens
Chapter 12
Post-prodcution
Chapter 13
Getting the job - The business of animation
Previously, she was director of Animated Exeter, a lively annual animation festival. In 1996, she founded the Bristol Animation Course at the University of the West of England, supported by Aardman Animations. It was this course, along with several years working on and off at Aardman in the camera department, that resulted in her first Stop Motion book.
Susannah has also directed radio and television programmes for the BBC, having worked at BBC Bristol as an assistant editor and in the distant past, an assistant animator on the series, Animated Conversations, the BBC's precursor to Channel 4's LipSynch series.