In this example, Stinky Fenton eyeballs a cake with a suspicious-looking “candle.” Nip away at the fuse frame by frame to animate it. At the explosion frame, substitute a blown-apart fire- work and shine a bright light into the shot to create interactive lighting. For the last frame, doctor the figure and set to show the aftermath. Follow steps shown in Figures 5.23–5.30.
The Pillsbury Doughboy
The Pillsbury campaign was the bread-and- butter work for the small handful of stop motion shops in the 1960s and 1970s. When I entered the field, I was fortunate to have been invited by effects artist Harry Walton to stop by the Figure 5.20 Position the puppet for the next frame. Sometimes it may be hard to get an exact match because the figures are so dif- ferent. The important elements are the head and the club position. If you can match those elements, the rest of the limbs will generally follow along nicely.
Figure 5.21 After you have finished animating, you can press the Play button to see your work. The ghost image will disappear, and your puppet will move exactly like your actor.
Figure 5.22 The Golf Swing animation.
CPC studio in Hollywood to see how these classic commercials were executed. Harry was one of my early mentors in the business who was always willing to share a tip or two and give encouragement to a young person starting out. He continues to share today, as seen by these wonderful images from his archive that he generously allowed me to use throughout this book.
Here are some of my recollections of a visit to a Doughboy stage in the 1970s. The puppet was a very small figure, about 6 inches in height with a ball-and-socket armature and a cast foam rubber body. His head was one of a series of wax heads used to make him speak. A master rubber mold was made of a mouthless face, and a number of white wax copies were made from this mold. Each wax head contained a small square metal hole that would fit over a square post in the armature, ensuring exact registration. The artists used heated dental tools to carve mouth shapes into the blank heads in order to create replacement heads for the voice. The chef’s hat was a single model that was also pegged into each of the heads. As much as possible, the animators limited the replacement aspect to avoid accidental stuttering of the form as a result of imperfections
Figure 5.23 Animate the fuse being eaten away by snipping it shorter frame by frame.
Figure 5.25 Shoot the aftermath.
Figure 5.26 Go to Tools, Frame Painter.
Figure 5.27 Open the Colour and Size panel, and choose the whitest white and a radius of 2, feather of 10, and opacity of 100. If you have a high-resolution image, you may want to increase the radius and feather settings.
Figure 5.28 Paint in the flame of the fuse using erratic brushstrokes. You don’t have to be perfectly matched frame for frame. It is a flame after all. When you finish a frame, click the Next button. Select Save Changes.
Figure 5.29 When you get to the explosion, feel free to vary the brush size and feather to paint in the burst. If you open the Actions panel, you will see that you have a convenient Onion Skinning tool that will enable you to view your previous frame atop the current one. Continue to animate the explosion until you white out the frame.
Figure 5.30 A simple explosion sequence using the Stop Motion Pro frame-painting tool. A typical explosion sequence might be two frames before white out, and then you might use After Effects to do a quick 8- to 12-frame fadeout of the white to reveal the aftermath. You can also use After Effects to composite smoke on top of the figure. Stinky Fenton character, © Mark Sawicki.
in the casting process; hence the same hat was used each time a new head was replaced on the single body. The blue pupils were sticky round paper that were affixed to the wax head and manipulated. The hand poking the Doughboy was (on occasion) a real hand that was mounted in place and held steady and animated along with the puppet, and in other cases a pointing hand was plunged into a bucket of dentist’s alginate (the mold making-substance used for teeth) in order to make a mold. After the mold gelled, the hand was gently released, and plaster of paris was used to make a perfect hand model that could be animated for the “poke.” Each time I visited, I made sure to poke the little fellow myself just to be able to say I did. Clever stabilization techniques were used for the kitchen props. For a pile of almonds, for example, the studio merely took a bunch of real almonds (nothing beats real) and pressed them into a lump of clay to make a stable pyramid of almonds that would otherwise be precarious. Many of the composites of the Doughboy interacting with people were done using front light back light techniques similar to those outlined in Chapter 11.
Small animation shops like CPC were divided into several areas, typically a machine shop, a wood working area, sculpting and mold-making areas, offices, and a stage. There was a marvelous sense of organized chaos in these small studios. The brightly lit perfect miniature set was surrounded in the darkness by a curious col- lection of puppets, molds, dollhouses, old lighting fixtures, raw materials, paint, and bric-a-brac. An old joke states: “You knew the lighting was done when there was no room left on the setup for the animator.” These humble little shops gave life to the Doughboy and became the breeding ground for the pioneering artists who helped build the huge effects industry we know today.
Summary
1. Puppet animation has many roots from Eastern European artists.
2. Ladislaw Starewicz (aka Ladislaw Starewitch) was a natural scientist from Russia who became one of the earliest practitioners of stop motion puppetry.
3. Jiri Trnka was a Czechoslovakian filmmaker who had many hidden political messages in the puppet films he made under Soviet rule.
Figure 5.32 The Doughboy and his armature. Courtesy of Harry Walton, vfxmasters.com.
Figure 5.31 Harry Walton, animating the Doughboy. Courtesy of Harry Walton, vfxmasters.com.
4. Tadahito Mochinaga was the famed Japanese puppet animator who was responsible for the work on the world-famous Rankin and Bass holiday TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
5. George Pal paved the way for many puppet animators who made their mark in television commercials bringing to life corporate icons such as the Pillsbury Doughboy.
6. The simplest puppets to utilize for stop motion are collage puppets composed of parts interconnected with flexible wire.
7. Rotoscoping is the term used for any type of photographic or video reference for creating artwork for animation or visual effects. For Stop Motion Pro, it is often used as a reference of a human actor making complex moves to speed up the process of animation.
8. The paint tool can be used to add 2D animation to your scene.
Films to See
● Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
1964, Rankin Bass.
Figure 5.33 Harry animates the finger poke with replacement Doughboys to facilitate the indentation of the belly. Courtesy of Harry Walton, vfxmasters.com.
Figure 5.34 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Courtesy of the Rick Gold- schmidt archives, www.rankinbass.com