Will Becher

During my visit to Manchester Animation Festival I attended many great talks, but there were a couple of talks that related to my research project. one of those talks was by Will Becher, here are my notes on the lecture:

Mr Becher started as a trainee assistant on the curse of the ware rabbit at Aardman studios. He became a lead animator on an adventure with pirates and scientists.

He started animating as a hobby with a simple old video camera as a teenager in his room, after a few years of experimenting with stop-motion he started sending letters over and over again with constant asking he finally started working for Aardman Studios.

He went on to describe the development and pipeline of animations that Aardman take on. It starts with a script (this was hard during Shaun the sheep due to the absence of dialogue). then the storyboard is created using cintiques to achieve a more accurate digital visual representation. then onto the animatic which Will described as being in the form of a blue print for the whole film. going shot by shot to find out exactly what models need making for example, the animatic always has audio included.

Creating the world

The scale for Aardmans animations is what Will describes as 'bespoke' so they couldn't find props that are already built so everything is made by hand, this relates to my research as one of the differences between stop-motion and CGI, if Aardman have to create every element of the animations by hand this is going to bump up the man hours and cost of materials, not to mention the cost of those man hours. where as CGI has unlimited supply of materials due to it all being virtual and all the space required in the virtual world. the only similarity is the man hours that will be required to produce either physical or virtual assets. It also took longer to produce my own stop-motion set due to drying times of adhesive and paint where its instantaneous with CGI.

The actual sets for Aardman films were described as being very large resembling live action film sets! this also goes back to my statement about the restrictions of stop-motion aniamtion, these large sets need to be stored somewhere and this costs money where as CGI sets are all housed in one ore several computers which only take up storage space which in relation is a lot cheaper to maintain when needing extra storage space.

One thing Will Becher described was very beneficial to me as I love creating sets and am always looking for new ways to achieve different aesthetics, one aspect I have always been a little wary about was grass, I only use static grass which only really works for very small scale models. Will Becher described the method they used, they got brown teddy bear felt and painted it green which gave an outstandingly realistic effect. but there was one down side that was noticed and that was the unwanted adjustment of the texture by the animator between frames when animating, this creates a distracting twitch in the scenery, going back to what Barry Purves said about how manipulative real textures are and how positive this was, but this is a negative occurrence that needs constant thought to avoid this, this kind of thing isn't present in CGI but then again its a completely different aesthetic.

After the sets are created along with all the handmade assets, the characters then start being produced. this starts with plasticine sculpts followed by individual armatures. a fibre glass mould is then created to surround the sculpt, this is then filled with a mould material to produce the master mould. Anything with lots of detail is made out of a hard material to avoid manipulating all of the small details in the animation process, which again isn't an issue with CGI animation, everything else is then made using plasticine.

Skipping forward to something more relate-able to my research project is the post production, with many characters in various shots required a rig to keep them airborne in certain scenes, this needs removing in the post production stage, the problem I had with my rig was the fact a few of the parts were missing from the rig I got my hands on so the rig couldn't be tightened which means it wouldn't even support itself let alone a character, so I was forced to make the animation less dynamic by having the characters on the ground the whole time. I shouldn't have to state that this isn't a problem with CGI but what is the problem is the fact that rigging a character in Maya for example is much trickier and requires a lot of experience to create even fairly simple rigs that include IK and FK handles where as stop-motion the rigs are all created by hand and even a novice armature maker can create a simple armature and know exactly how it works just through touch.

So I did learn some valuable techniques from this talk but ultimately it re-iterated some of the physical boundaries of stop motion that CGI does not encounter such as space and material costs for example, but it also linking in with my practical work the relation between stop-motion and CGI in the form of character animation is much different due to physical rigs being needed to keep characters airborne which is where I encountered issues where as CGI encounters no such issues but instead requires a certain degree of knowledge to create even a simple rig where as a novice can create an armature out of simple wire that will serve the same purpose as a complex one with very little re-productions and only less control.