15/16 February & 22/23 February 10am-4.30pm
Last night I caught up with Mary Murphy, workshop leader and Associate Lecturer at Bristol School of Animation about what she’s planning for these weekends. Stop-motion animation is a painstaking process with 3 seconds of film representing a day’s filming and that’s not counting all the prep and pre-production. Mary’s approach refines the process, making stop motion accessible and affordable. She describes her approach as “kitchen sink”, all materials are readily available (usually on Amazon or at Maplins). She has honed the fabrication process into a simple step by step approach that creates a sophisticated and robust puppet. Her mission is to de-mystify the whole process, giving participants the tools and confidence to take them through from concept to a working character. This is what Mary had to say about the weekends.
“These weekends are for people who are starting out, who want to investigate animation, who have an idea for a character and want to find out how to make the character live and breathe. We will be focussing on the model-making rather than the filming, although that is part of the process. By the end everyone will have realised their character idea as a puppet and had a chance to explore its movement on camera.
Many people have a great idea of the visual look of a character, hair colour, skin tone, but that is the last stage in creating a stop-motion puppet. Unlike a design that is realised in a static 3D form, the character needs to breathe and move in a realistic way on film, like in live puppetry. It’s important to understand the underlying structure, the armature, the joints etc that are needed to give you control over your creation so that you can bring it to life on camera. The first weekend will give people the chance to create their own puppet character using the “kitchen sink” process. The second weekend will introduce industry standard tools and processes. We will look at the type of joints and armatures used by companies such as Aardman and how they relate to the puppets and characters we have been creating over the two weekends.
I love running these workshops, they are the kind of workshops I wish had existed when I was learning stop-motion! With these puppets people can start telling stories quite quickly and I often find myself learning new things from participants. ”
15/16 February
22/23 February
10am-4.30pm
at Puppet Place
£310 / £290 Members (for both weekends all materials provided).
Next Post Interview with Nic Prior: Bristol Festival of Puppetry Production Manager and Facilitator for A Blagger’s Guide to Technical Riders 19 February.
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