Barry the biscuit boy

I stubbled upon this animation earlier today, it made me laugh so much! 

Enjoy!

Helpful books

Here are some really helpful books to have as reference material while doing Stop motion. From Animation to puppet making, these books have a bunch of helpful tips and tricks!

The Boxtrolls is coming out soon!

Yes finally, an other amazing stop motion animation by Laika. They've truly perfected the art of stop motion in my opinion. Tim Burton started it for me but then I was a bit disappointed on his last try with

Frankenweenie.... I didn't even finish watching it.  But this is a movie I am rly looking forward to seeing! Luca and I have been spamming each other with different trailers for the film for a few weeks now and we both can't wait to go see it! 

Check out the trailers!


    

 

   

Peak Condition by Laura Jane Favela

This animation "peaked" my interest. Sorry for that painful play on words! It's a really fun animation, that toast cracks me up as much as it creeps me out... Love the toasts voice too. 

Enjoy!

Paranorman

I recently stumbled upon these old pictures I took of the Paranorman premier at the Montreal Fantasia Festival, and it made me realize that I haven't yet blogged about this amazing movie! I know it came out a few years ago but I just watched it recently and loved it as much as the first time I saw it. I was lucky to see the Canadian premier and both the Director and Producer of the film were there and we got to ask them questions after the film. It was pretty awesome. 

 

I looooved this movie!

Everything about it! The storyline, the art direction, the cliché humour, everything! It's a relatable movie with so many fun jokes about all the cheesy horror films we love. The amount of details there are to notice in this movie are endless. Every time I watch it I'll notice something new that I hadn't noticed before. There are so many details and lovely things to look at. The set design was so perfectly made to match the characters. Not one line is perfect, or straight, and I think that says a lot about the characters in the story. Even though Norman is the outsider, I think that all the characters are misfits in their own ways.

The character design for Paranorman is by a FEMALE character artist, named Heidi Smith. That's right, a girl! I'll post a few of her drawings below, it's brilliant stuff!

I love watching the making of this film, you can find a lot of them online, i'll also be posting a few vids. It's a bit insane to what extent they went through to get all the details perfect. And that's what I love about stop motion. Everything is carefully hand crafted, sometimes even using the actual material the replicated object is made out of, but only in miniature. And me being an extremely meticulous and sometimes a bit obsessive compulsive type of person, I can truly appreciate and even WORSHIP the amount of skill and work it takes to make each and every single tiny object perfect. It's the little details that make the big differences.

                         



                        

                                             

Portlandia - Rats

If you've never herd of the show Portlandia, let me sum it up for you. Portlandia is a hilarious tv series set in Portland Oregon and it stars SNL's Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein from the bands Wild Flag and Sleater-Kinney. In the show, they impersonate manny of Portlan's stereo typical characters such as vegan hippies, environmentalists, hipster, punks, extreme feminists and much more. It's the type of humour that makes you think "that's funny because it's true", it has an akward kinda humour too that I love! And on one of the episode they had a little stop motion short, (posted above) Hope you enjoy!

GREAT PERFORMANCES | Peter & the Wolf | Making of Peter

I stumbled upon this short a few years ago, and I thought I'd share it with you. I think this animation has a lot of beautiful shots and the character puppets are aesthetically pleasing too. The number one "faux pas" in stop motion puppet design, is making them look too creepy. Witch is hard to do since dolls and puppets in general are  creepy and bringing them to life (or in motion) adds to the creepy factor. One mistake I often see in stop motion is mouth and eye animation. If you can't master mouth mouvement, don't do it. And I think that this animation does it very well with the few facial expressions it has in the film. Even though there are few different facial expressions, you can still feel the emotions in each of the characters. There are numerous ways to portray emotion in film making. One way they did this, is through the soundtrack. As if the music did most of the talking. The overall puppet animation is ok but I think the wolf is the one that's animated the best here. And I love the little crow that can't fly and the hilarious fat cat! Oh and poor duck! :(