I kinda got into this by accident - I've no particular love for stop motion, or animation in general for that matter; I simply don't have the patience to spend 3 hours producing 10 seconds of footage, or in the case of Real 10, 12 months producing 7 minutes of footage!
However, stop motion animation is a technique that allows me to combine my two interests of model making and films. I've never been interested in computer animation. It produces amazing results, but the main love for me is actually creating the models and editing and adding effects to the footage. The bit in between (i.e. filming the thing) is abit of an inconvenience.
I'd never attempted stop motion animation before I started thinking about making Real 10 but I was familiar with how it worked from reading copious amounts of Star Wars 'making of' and Industrial Light and Magic articles.
It was abit of a learning curve at first, more in terms of getting the timing right within the animation - how many frames should a sword swing last for?
The green screen was a bit of wood with paint from Homebase on it, the lights were £5 security lights and the puppets were artists mannequins with plastic, metal and sculpey over them.
I was fairly pleased with the end result. There's no story of course, but that's not what I'm about really - it's all about the models and effects for me.
I wanted to make a more sophisticated puppet the next time round, even though I swore I'd never do another animation after spending so long on the last one! For A Tale From The Endless Stair I decided to buy a professional stop motion animation armature and cast the puppet in silicon. The full process is detailed here. A big thank you to Stop Motion Works for a very kind review.
A Tale From The Endless Stair came out fairly well, although I think I got abit too carried away with the narrative. Still, I did get it done in record time (at least when compared to my previous animation. I guess this was partially due to experience but also because I'd bought some decent photography lights and professional green screen equipment which helped alot.
I also got sidetracked halfway through making A Tale from the Endless Stair and made a music video. This one featured a stop motion robot. While it only had some stop motion in it, it was the first time I'd tried combining stop motion and live action together.
My latest is not really a stop motion animation at all, although it does have one short stop motion sequence featuring a clockwork robot. Oldroid is a puppet animation with abit of a steampunk influence. An old man has problems with his gramophone.......
Next one's probably going to be a werewolf transformation sequence which will probably be more puppet than stop mo based. I am toying with the idea of doing a full body stop motion animated werewolf for a shot or two though. I'm not sure how else I'd depict a walking werewolf other than building a full scale costume. Now there's an idea....;0)