I started a stop-motion workshop today, at one of the many cultural centres São Paulo has to offer. It's a week-long, basic introduction to all forms of stop-motion from pixilation (as opposed to pixelation) to claymation, like 'Wallace and Gromit', as well as a bit of flash animation; and best of all, it's completely free.
I've never really thought about working with stop-motion much, probably because when I think of it, I think of something like 'The Corpse Bride' or 'Chicken Run', which look so impossibly precise that at times it's hard to believe they're stop-motion at all. I just think that I'd have no idea where to start. But more recently, I've been watching lots of shorts and music videos using the technique which show that you can make something very creative with limited resources. This short film is a good example of this.
It dawned on me that perhaps it's a filmmaking method I haven't explored yet but which I could use to produce some films on my own. So when my friend mentioned the workshop to me, I didn't even think twice about it.
Today's lesson was very introductory, with the teacher showing a few films he'd made and demonstrating the different techniques he'd used, some of the common mistakes that he encountered, and also some films he'd made at other workshops. Surprisingly, they were a lot better than I would've imagined, particularly one he'd made with a group of teenagers. Ultimately, today was pretty much an informal lecture whilst tomorrow is when we'll start to get our hands dirty, messing around with clay figures and doing some tests. The two things that did become very clear today were that stop-motion a huge amount of planning with little room for improvisation and that it takes a hell of a long time. Just think that on the last Wallace and Gromit film, 'The Curse of the Were-rabbit', it was stated that they only managed to produce 3 seconds of usable material a day. For an hour-and-a-half-long film, that's... well, you can do the maths.
Finally, I just thought I'd include a film mentioned during today's lesson. It's a 1952 film called 'Neighbours' by Norman McLaren, famed for many of his groundbreaking techniques in terms of combining and synchronising animation and music. 'Neighbours' mixes live action and stop-motion footage to produce a visually stunning film but which also offers a strong anti-violence message, delivered most effectively by the film's ironic punchline.
