It’s one hell of a scam! To make this type of animation, you need to take pictures of each action of the characters and then join them in a sequence that gives the illusion of movement. “On a good day at work, you can shoot a maximum of five seconds of animation,” says Rafael Terpins, director of Batalha – A Guerra do Vinil, a Brazilian clay animation that airs on Fridays on Cartoon Network.
Called stop-motion (something like “stopped movement”), this technique of filming puppets frame by frame is almost as old as cinema: it was first used in the classic The Humpty Dumpty Circus, an 1898 film in which toys wooden hinges come to life. Today, clay animation has an air of overproduction. “The producers of Chicken Run and the Wallace & Gromit series use a secret recipe for Play-Doh in the dolls. The dolls of A Noiva Cadaver, on the other hand, have heads molded with silicone over clockwork gears, which simulate facial muscles,” says Rafael.
The guys from Batalha… also had to sweat: they made 28 puppets and three sets, in a job that took three years to complete. Filming begins this month and should be finished by December. “To shoot 12 minutes, we must take 8,640 pictures. It really is a battle!”, says Rafael.
Very cool!
Brazilian animation uses 8,000 photos to bring puppets to life
1. An animation in clay is born in a joint work. A screenwriter imagines the story and a designer scribbles the dolls in two versions: a black-and-white drawing, which serves as a template for the skeleton, and a colored one, which is the basis for modeling.
2. With the black-and-white drawing in hand, the artists begin to create the “skeleton” of the characters. The copper wire “bones” are attached to each other by means of “joints”, made with screws, nuts and stainless steel balls, to give the structure mobility.
3. This skeleton is thrown into a plaster mold that shapes the “doubt” doll – which is, in fact, a mixture of silicone with a pigment that gives the character’s skin tone. With the action of a chemical product, the mixture hardens and creates the doll’s body.
4. The doll gets cloth clothes and a touch of emotion: the producers shape different types of eyes and eyebrows according to a table of expressions to convey happiness, sadness, etc. In the case of the mouths, the expressions also simulate the main sounds of speech
5. While the puppet modeling team does all this work, another group creates the scenarios. In the case of Batalha – A Guerra do Vinil, the main setting is a 3.70 x 2 meter shantytown, made of wood, cardboard, plaster and resin from a computer-designed 3D plan.
6. Remember that guy who imagined the story in caption 1? Because he didn’t stand still: he created the dialogues for the dubbing of the characters and then helped to put together the animatic, a traditional cartoon, in 2D, which serves as a rough draft of the movie in plasticine.
7. With the animatic in hand, it’s time to record! The sketch-drawing already has the dubbing of the characters, the times and the camera angles in each scene – that is, all the reference material to photograph the puppets and give rise to the film with clay
8. Recording! With a digital camera, the filmmakers take pictures of the puppets. In the stop-motion technique used in Batalha…, 24 photos are taken for each second of film, the same as in the cinema. Each photo is saved in a digital file and then printed on film, resulting in a roll of film.
9. On the film reel, the sequence feels like movement. The visual part of the animation is ready. Finally, in a laboratory, the image is merged onto the roll of film to the sound of soundtracks and dubbing. Now, just rotate the drawing!