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Demeber-2010-Issue.Pdf John Ikuma - Executive Editor / Layout / Writer Melissa Piekaar - Editor Pike Baker - Writer Cara Zambri - Contributing Writer Letter From the Editor: In this issue you will a great interview with the legendary Will Vinton. Mr. Vinton was kind enough to talk to us about his life and career as one of the major influences in our industry. We owe him a huge thank you for granting us the opportunity to talk with him. We hope you will feel as inspired as much as we do from his words of wisdom. On another note, I am currently playing catch up with this issue. Though this is marked as the December Issue, it is actually being released in late January for a number of reasons. The first reason is since this is such a small publication with only a few contributors; I am faced with most of the responsibility for produc- ing it. This involves many many hours of work. Since there are so few advertisers I must spend most of my available time dedicated to my Visual Effects Company and often this means hours of animating and bring in income to pay the bills. I’m not complaining about getting work though in these hard times. Also, being privileged enough to be paid to do what I love is a dream come true. But what I’m really saying is, sorry for the delay. We should be completely caught up by the end of February and back on schedule. The crew and I would like to thank you very much for your support and dedication as readers and we hope to provide you with more is- sues for years to come. With much appreciation I would like to thank you and hope you enjoy this issue. Keep Animating John Ikuma Executive Editor Stop Motion Magazine Contents: pg 6: Tool Review pg 7: Book Review pg 9: Will Vinton Interview pg 22: The Miracle Lady Interview pg 27: Ian Timothy - A Young Animators Story Now everyone is a professional... Stop Motion Pro does a lot more than capture frames from a camera to a computer then play them back in realtime. For over 10 years we have been building a comprehensive toolset that gives students, teachers, independent and professional animators the power to make award winning films. Add explosions, eye movements, mouth shapes and more with the Frame Painter tool As used by Aardman Animations: • Wallace and Gromit Prop your puppets up, • Pirates (feature film) including flying objects with • Shaun the Sheep ease using the Rig Removal • Timmy tool And more: •Onionskinning and Adjust timing live on looping options for smoother movement set, copy and paste •Chroma key / frames with our unique blue screen tool to thumbnail Editor tool blend live action and animation •Studio workflow integration Professional Canon and Nikon DSLR camera control from $185 (USD) wwww.stopmotionpro.com Tool- Review: Bench Top Cut-off Saw By Pike Baker One of the biggest challenges to making an armature for you puppet is cutting your materials so that they don’t have wrong angles or rough edges. Tradition- ally you would use a hacksaw or if you had enough money to get some power tools you’d purchase a Dremel. Those options are great and in expert hands can yield professional looking cuts for your puppet building. But one thing that of- ten slows a project way down is the amount of time it takes to build a puppet. So here enters the “Bench Top Cut-off Saw”. This little device is super fast and very affordable. So I thought I’d give you a run down of what this little monster can do. Out of the box it’s set up and ready to cut small wood pieces like balsa wood or small dowels. But its saw tooth cutting wheel should not be used for cutting metal stock since it will only destroy the blade and make a total mess of your work. There is a solution to this and it’s also very reasonable. Micro Mark (micromark.com) offers not just the “Bench Top Cut-Off Saw” but also little cutting discs that resemble the cutoff wheels that you’d attach to a Dremel. The difference here is that the wheels are larger and are made for the Cut-Off Saw. Removing the first blade from the saw was a little difficult, but with some effort I was able to remove it and replace it with the new disc. One of the great things about this tool is that it is very easy and simple to use. You clamp the metal stock or tubing into the built in clamp system. You then press the power button and lower the blade using the built in handle and away you go with cutting. The results are great for an under $30 power tool. With armatures there has always been an issue with sanding the cut pieces of metal. With the abrasion disc in the cutoff saw you will find that it not only cuts the piece clean but it also sands as it cuts. Another great feature of the tool is that the clamping system allows you to change the angle of your cuts. So if you need an angled piece of metal or wood you can set your clamp to the desired angle and then cut away. In conclusion I’d like to say that this is probably one of the most important tools you could purchase for yourself and your studio. It not only reduces the hazard of cutting metal but also gives you a clean professional look without spending extra time refining your work. Currently there are two companies that sell the “Bench Top Cut-Off Saw”, HarborFreight.com and MicroMark.com both of- fer the tool, but after doing some research I could only find the abrasion discs at Micro Mark. So don’t wait, get this power tool and make your life easier. Book Review: The Cuter Book (Author: Aranzi Aronzo) Review by John Ikuma If you’re ever stuck on character design or your animations over all design, there are some great resources out there that you should consider looking into for inspiration. One such book is “The Cut- er Book” by Aranzi Aronzo. This particular book covers how to make fluffy felt creatures with very little effort or skills required. It covers sewing techniques, templates, and methods that you can use to design your own characters. The book is filled with draw- ings and pictures that make every instruction easy to understand. This is also one book in a series of books that cover the same subject but show even more designs and methods on how to make these fluffy felt characters. I highly suggest getting this book if your looking to get a little inspiration and develop a style all your own. The best part of the book is the fact that all the materials are cheap to buy and you could literally make hundreds of these char- acters for under $50 in materials. You can find “The Cuter Book” on Amazon.com or order through your local book store. Will Vinton is a larger then life living legend. Not only has his definition of clay animation “Claymation”, become a house- hold name, but his energy as a filmmaker has left an inspiring mark on our society. We asked Will to take time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about who he is and what it took to become such an iconic person in our day and age. SMM: What got you into using clay for animation? Vinton: I was at the University of California in Berkley study- ing Architecture, and was really interested in filmmaking. In fact I think I would have been enrolled in a film curriculum if there had been one. But I was in architecture, and liked the curriculum a lot. One of the things that got me into clay was that I got really inspired by Antoni Gaudi, the Spanish archi- tect that did all this organic structured architecture in Barce- lona, Spain. I started designing with clay because I figured that to create these organic shapes, you really couldn’t use the typi- cal t-square and straight edges and so forth. You had to sculpt the shapes. So I devised ways to sculpt and design buildings with clay, and then sliced them so you could do sections and different things. It was pretty cool. As I said, I was already experimenting with filmmaking, and I would create a whole new building and then have a stop mo- in a sense it was probably my first love. I was doing stop tion camera move through it in stages, to give a feel for a point motion and pixilation experiments. So it was really a case of of view experience, kind of like walking through a building. At designing and working with clay along with other architect the time, that was something that didn’t exist which was kind of and artist friends, and kind of crossing paths with stop motion cool in and of itself. You have these nice scale models that you animation, doing early tabletop stop motion work. I had done go through and know what they feel like. People are so used to some experimenting with stop motion, just in creating build- interpreting what they see on the screen as being real, that it was ings. kind of fun and fairly impressive to do that kind of stuff. SMM: With your early work you won an Academy Award for Closed Mondays.
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