Off Book

[intro music] MATHEW AMONSON: I think what really attracts people to stop motion is the sense that there's something real there.

There's a real object there.

And there's people who made that.

JEREMY BRONSON: And then even discovering how it's made doesn't necessarily kill the magic.

For me that's inspiring.

MEAGAN CIGNOLI: Stop motion has a very playful quality but also the element of surprise.

HAYLEY MORRIS: Stop motion appealed to me because you can make your own characters.

You can make your own sets.

You can make your own world that's in your head.

DEAN KALMAN LENNERT: Basically, if you have the fortitude to move it, you can use it for stop motion animation.

Stop motion animation is the art of manipulating objects and photographing them in single-frame increments using a motion picture or a digital camera to create the illusion of movement.

You can use anything with stop motion.

It could be either puppets or clay or sand or paint or people.

Now, the process of shooting, let's say you're doing some puppet animation.

You'd have a table top set.

You're going to walk over to the puppet, and you're going to put it in its first pose, go back to the computer and hit the key to shoot off that first frame or first two frames.

And then the process repeats like that.

Historically, the first stop motion film made was done by a British animator named Arthur Melbourne Cooper called Matches: An Appeal.

And that was in 1899.

There's two histories.

One is the European history, and one is the American history.

The European history is stop motion being used as a storytelling medium.

The reason for this is historically in Europe you had puppet theater, and you already had this history of people going to see puppet shows.

In the United States the premier art form for the 20th century was cartoons and hand-drawn work.

And stop motion generally fell under the special effects category.

And it was like that until 1993 when Jurassic Park came out.

I know a lot of stop motion animators who really felt that that was the end of the art form.

But anything that's still done by hand, and because stop motion is perceived as taking a lot of time, it impresses people more.

When they see something like that and it's a CG thing, it's like, oh, OK, well, that was just CG rabbits jumping around.

But when they see something that like, oh, wait a minute, those were big things of clay that people were moving around.

That was real?

Oh, wow.

So I think there's something to be said for dealing with real objects and having something that's still handmade in the digital age.

HAYLEY MORRIS: Stop motion can be really powerful to get across serious messages and important topics that so many people are dealing with right now.

Undone is a short film that I made that was based on my grandfather.

And he had Alzheimer's disease.

I didn't really want to make a literal story of Alzheimer's.

I wanted to explore surreal and fantastical imagery to represent what that must feel like.

I imagined it must feel like you're lost in this vast ocean that doesn't look like a real ocean, but it's made of fabric and soft materials that are comforting.

And you see glimpses of things that you can't grasp that seem real, but they're not real.

So you can make these really surreal images using so many different materials like fabric, paper, clay, string.

I don't think doing hand drawn animation or another form of animation would have really captured it.

For instance, the puppet of the old man, I made him out of string and developed the idea of the string becoming kind of a symbol for the deterioration.

So as the film goes on, the string overtakes him.

And you see the progression of how he's breaking down, and his mind's breaking down.

And he's trying to hold onto things.

The opportunities in stop motion are just endless.

And you can make these really surreal images and an emotional image that I don't think you could do necessarily in live action film.

MATHEW AMONSON: When I saw that scene in Star Wars when Chewbacca's playing that alien chess thing with R2D2, and those toys moved by themself.

I was, like, blown away.

And from that point on-- JEREMY BRONSON: I want that.

Those are the toys I wanted.

There's something there that, when you see it, it's magical, really.

I mean, It's a physical object that's moving by itself that shouldn't really do that.

Something in your brain, I think, just says this is so cool.

You know, this is great.

Magic in the real world.

But in terms of putting everything together creatively, it's really difficult.

MATHEW AMONSON: A lot of problem solving, physical problem solving.

A lot of planning.

For example, the Sesame Workshop pieces that we did, that was a long process.

We could say a month just in the animating.

JEREMY BRONSON: We built this really large underwater set.

MATHEW AMONSON: And then the set was for a shot where the camera follows down into the water and we follow one tadpole back up to the surface.

And that one shot took us 12 hours.

Yeah.

MATHEW AMONSON: And just like any actor would play a character differently, you are playing that character, really, is what you're doing, only you're doing it in stop motion.

You have to first act it out, and then you have to figure out how do I break that up into 24 bits per 1 second.

So you have to hold that in your head the entire time and be able to separate and then come back right where I left off.

If you get into stop motion, you realize right away you're going to be spending a lot of time doing this.

And you better find many places inside the process that you can really enjoy.

Otherwise you're going to be killing yourself.

MATHEW AMONSON: You find that thing that makes it exciting.

JEREMY BRONSON: We can, like, stay in the zone together and enjoy it.

MEAGAN CIGNOLI: Vine is fun because each one is so different.

I can be as eclectic and all over the place as I want to be and try out something new every single day.

The frame rate is so fast that you can do really great stop motion on there.

One night I was taking colored water and filling up jars, watching it go up and down and changing the colors and that kind of thing, and I was like, ah, this looks so cool.

I just kept playing with it until someone told me what I was doing was stop motion.

I think something that really gets people addicted to Vine is it's almost like a video game.

Like, all the parameters, they create rules, whereas you don't have any rules when you were just working with the camera, like you're making whatever you want to do.

But with this there's very clear parameters.

You only have six seconds.

You can't edit.

You can't add sound later, so if you want to do sound you have to sync it.

When you want to record you just tap, and when you don't want to record you move your hand.

So you do, like, little teeny taps and kind of know your timing with Vine and get used to it, because if you mess up, you have to begin again.

These things take at least an hour, if not many, many more hours.

Sometimes you can do 160 taps in six seconds.

I think the reason stop motion works for Vine because it's like being able to show something very, very quickly.

People's attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.

And I think people really love to see things they don't see every day.

It's kind of magical.

JEREMY BRONSON: It's gotten to the point where a lot of people assume that it was made with CG.

But I don't think it really matters if something gives someone an emotional response and it's working.

HAYLEY MORRIS: It does take a lot of patience.

But it's really satisfying seeing your characters and sets come to life.

MEAGAN CIGNOLI: All day long people will tag me in their videos.

And they're like, I tried stop motion, or inspired by Meagan Cignoli.

I think a lot of people are playing with it right now, and it's exciting.

DEAN KALMAN LENNERT: For me at moments it almost goes back to when you were a kid and you're playing with your toys and you're imagining that they have life.

You're seeing your imagination play out in front of you.

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