Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Replacement Animation

Replacement animation is a form of stop motion. But instead of making one puppet that you put through its paces, you make interchangeable pre-sculpted elements and swap them in and out.



For example if you watch closely, you can see that the little impact cloud-puffs are a animated with 5 separate rings of sculpted white blobs on very thin wires.


It takes a while to create all the stop-motion puppets and accessories for replacement animation. But once you do it, the animation goes fast. It's easy to animate 10 seconds per hour, while with traditional animation, it would take up to two full weeks to animate that many seconds.

5 comments:

Jessica Kirby said...

What kind of software are you using to produce this? The sound effects and lightning bolts are great in this.

James Gurney said...

The only software I used was a time lapse compilation software called "Time Lapse Assembler" and iMovie for video and sound editing.

Jessica Kirby said...

Thank you. I've been reading the book "Gumby Imagined: the Story of Art Clokey and his Creations". It's fascinating, all of the techniques and technology they used. Probably seems primitive to what we have available today but the work is timeless.

Unknown said...

When the green guy flew off screen, was that all motion blur?

James Gurney said...

Tyler, yes, a lot of the fast action frames are blurred. The blur isn't done in post — it's all shot practically by manipulating the puppets in front of the camera set with a slow shutter speed. Gives the animation a different look.