Famous stars meet with MP

Animation stars Wallace and Gromit met with Edmonton MP, Andy Love who was wearing his wrong trousers for the childrens charity event "Wrong Trousers Day" last week. The MP wore some astrological trousers to inspire his North London constituents into helping this event raise money for projects to help children in hospices and hospitals throughout the UK.

http://www.wrongtrousersday.org/

Animation master class with Pixar’s Andrew Gordon!

Escape Studios are hosting a 2 day character animation master class in London on Thursday 10th and Friday 11th July 2008. It will be presented by Andrew Gordon from Pixar Animation Studios.

Topics will include:

• review of basic principles
• staging
• pose design
• gestures
• and high-level polishing techniques used to lift a shot from being good, to being great.

The master class will include a screening of Pixar’s new short film 'Presto'.

In other Pixar related news, a giant model of the robot Wall-E has been sighted outside the Empire in Leicester Square to promote the release of the film on 4th July.

Wire removal using travelling matt

Often in stop motion "wires" are used to allow models to complete jumping or other gravity defying moves. It is important to note that these are strong stiff wires that can support the model completely not suspended wires that would cause the model to sway about. Other tricks for cheating gravity are the use of glass sheets with items stuck to them (favourite for rain drops) or to rotate the whole set through 90deg and shoot vertically downwards.

When I made the Ratobat film, I manually painted out each of the "bridge" frames with a "clean image" background to complete the jump sequence. This was quite tedious even through there only about 25 frames for that sequence.



Kramer Klaymation this month has compiled a list of various techniques for removing wires (or other items) from your shot and has a video tutorial on using Open Source 3D software to create a travelling matt which replaces the wire with the clean shot. Some video editing software has the facility for adding drawings and hence can also use this kind of technique.

http://kramerklaymation.blogspot.com/2008/06/wire-removal.html