When it comes to camera moves stop motion drew the short straw. CG animation produces amazing, dazzling camerawork taking the viewer anywhere at the press of a button. With planning, so can drawn animation, but with puppets, it’s not easy. The physicality that is such a joy in stop motion has the drawback of the camera being in the way. In live action, the camera takes its motivation to move from the actors; with stop motion, in eff ect, the animator takes his motivation from the camera. Once a move is planned, as it must be, the animator has to move at a certain speed, reaching a mark at a particular frame. If a camera move were to adjust to
every change in speed of the animation it wouldn’t fl ow. This is hard and restrictive. We have strobing to contend with, something less of a problem with live action and CG, where the blurring of the image is a helpful part of the process. Depending on the budget, we can blur the image in postproduction or move the camera during the exposure of the frame, but still the animator has to follow the camera.
This is unnatural. Like good editing, which is usually invisible, camerawork wants to be inconspicuous. The worst moves direct the eye, anticipating something or giving something unnecessary import. Relating a moving camera to the eye, the eye is watching something in front of it, and then gets distracted by something to one side. The fi rst response is to move the eyes, only moving the head when necessary for a better view. The body follows. Likewise, once the eyes have focused on the object they stop, and the head and body eventually catch up before coming to a halt. It doesn’t happen all at the same time.
When a puppet starts moving, it is a mistake for the camera to move on the same frame. Like anything in animation, nothing starts at full speed, so the fi rst frames of a camera move must be small fairings, building up to the accepted speed. If the camera delays for too long or takes too many frames to get up to speed the puppet can move out of shot, unbalancing the framing. Slowing down the puppet while the camera catches up or suddenly speeding up results in an awkward move. In general, once a camera is plotted and on its way, there’s no stopping it. Shakespeare was prone to jumps in Next, with the camera following him. These jumps had to be carefully plotted and anticipated in the bar sheets. The heavily structured music score helped. I plotted the camera move to accommodate the jump on a certain beat, and trusted that I could animate the puppet into the right place at the right time, coordinating with the camera. This takes a lot of planning and even more instinct.
A camera move, like the animation itself, wants to fl ow, but, like the animation, this is not a matter of mathematics and equal division. The animator needs to work precisely with the cameraman, plotting the camera moves, rehearsing them, making marks, giving the impression the camera is following the animation.
Rigoletto was shot in a suitably Gothic railway arch in with trains regularly going overhead causing vibrations in the studio. We anticipated these by pausing, but we had not anticipated the electrical and magnetic surges that played havoc with our carefully planned camera moves. The camera wandered off in totally the wrong direction. (As did the radio-controlled animals in the stage musical of Doctor Dolittle, set off into uncontrollable spasms by passing taxis and the overhead planes coming into land.)
Rigoletto needed as much camera movement as possible to illuminate the music. Because the schedule was tough, walking the puppets everywhere on a huge set was impossible. They couldn’t be static with that lively music, so the moving camera helped to suggest that it was fi nding the characters on the run, giving the illusion of more movement than there was. Some scenes were passive, but a slowly creeping camera stopped the scene becoming stage bound, in the worst sense. Our particular camera was limited to two axis, but we
were inventive enough to push its limited movements. Moving the puppets to the camera with this music became like dancing with a partner.
These puppets were particularly impressive, able to take close-ups of their
amazingly articulate mouths. To have shot this fi lm with too many close-ups would have worked against freeing an opera from the stage. I wanted a dimension that
could not be done on stage, and set the whole action vertically, on a tall mountain. It worked as a visual metaphor for the fi lm’s hierarchy, and allowed some impressive visuals of characters dwarfed by this mountain, echoing the story. Too much spectacle would have separated the audience from the characters’ emotions, so there had to be a balance.
It is important to know what camera moves and lenses are available when writing and planning a fi lm. Rupert Bear did not have moving cameras as such, pushing me into fi nding a more energetic way of telling the stories. I had characters running in and out of shot, popping up behind things or racing about on skateboards. If a camera cannot provide movement and energy, then make sure that the staging does. Shooting with wide-angled lenses will emphasise any movement more than the limiting close-up lenses.
Strobing
Strobing can happen easily when, even though the puppet appears to be moving in the same direction as the camera, its relative position within the frame changes slightly, appearing to move backwards. This gives an unpleasant judder. This is unavoidable if the camera is moved in singles and the puppet in doubles, making the puppet shift around in the frame, fi ghting the move. A good reason not to shoot in doubles.
The easiest way to avoid strobing is, assuming the luxury of a monitor, to mark a constant point on the character on the screen for each frame, making sure that each new move progresses with roughly the appropriate increments. If it slips back or has a lesser increment then it will strobe. If there is no monitor, then a pointer attached to the camera can be lined up with the puppet in each frame. It’s not enough to think of the puppet moving around spatially on set, you have to think about it moving around the actual framing, and the more a puppet relates to its subsequent position, the easier the animation will read as clean and smooth.