Stop Motion News: The Fantastic Mr. Fox

20th Century Fox has announced they will be releasing a new stop-motion animated movie based on the best-selling children's book The Fantastic Mr. Fox by British author Roald Dahl (who also co-wrote the movie script with Noah Baumbach). The movie includes an all-star cast including Owen Wilson, George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, and many more. The movie will be released 13 of November.

In the movie Mr. and Mrs. Fox live an idyllic home life with their son Ash and visiting nephew Kristopherson. But after 12 years, the bucolic existence proves too much for Mr. Fox's wild animal instincts. Soon he slips back into his old ways as a sneaky chicken thief and, in doing so, endangers not only his beloved family, but the whole animal community. Trapped underground and with too little food to go around, the animals band together to fight against the evil Farmers -- Boggis, Bunce, and Bean -- who are determined to capture the audacious, fantastic Mr Fox at any cost.

Check out the trailer below.

Stop-Motion How-To:The Power Of the Unexpected

I'm kind of a dull person to watch movies with, since I really don't get too emotionally drawn into a movie. But I have noticed that the one thing that seem to provoke my feelings the most is the unexpected. When someone in a movie is sick and it's obvious he's going to die sooner or later, I rarely find myself saddened when he dies. But in a movie where the story seems rather predictable, and then suddenly one of the likable characters dies I find myself shocked and saddened by this new turn of events.

Or, to look at it from the other side of the coin, a gag can become much funnier when it's unexpected, such as in Aardman's short Aardman where a guy dressed up as a superhero walks up to what looks like a hole in the ground. He walks over the hole and nothing happens, but when he gets a couple steps past it, he falls through the ground, turning somthing that would have been a cliche into somthing that surpises the audience.

Of course, you can't use the unexpected too much, because it will soon become the expected. For instances, in M. Night Shyamalan's movies, people have come to expect a big twist in the end and often are disappointed because they wanted a epic twist when it was just a good one. Try doing something unexpected in your animations. If you do it right, you'll get some good reactions.



To illustrate my point, check out the video below.

Stop-Motion Fun Stuff: Super Mario World Stop-Motion Japanese Commercial

A couple days ago I stumbled across this rare stop-motion Japanese Commercial for the SNES 1990's Super Mario World. I have been a fan of Nintendo's Mario games for as long as I can remember, and it was cool to see Mario do his stuff as a stop-motion animated figure. You can check it out below.

Stop-Motion News: Aardman Announces Two New Full-Length Animated Movies!

Aardman Studios (the creators of Wallace and Gromit) have announced they will be bringing out two new animated movies. Arthur Christmas which will be done in CG, and Pirates will be shot in stop-motion animation. Arthur Christmas is about how Santa manages to get around the whole world in one night. Pirates is an adaptation of Gideon Defoe's book The Pirates! in which a hapless band of pirates compete for the Pirate of the Year award. Arthur Christmas is scheduled for release some time in 2011 and Pirates in 2012 . Both movies will be distributed by Sony Pictures. For more info about both of these upcoming feature films, check out this post from the official Wallace & Gromit site here

Stop-Motion How To: Making Puppets Talk, Part 2 of 2

In Part 1 of this post we talked about the different ways to create the lip movements for your puppets. You can check that post out here.


Lip sync is the process of making the lip movements you have animated match up with the pre-recorded voice. When I originally started lip syncing, I thought I could just switch the mouths around while animating, and then after I finished try to match my voice to it by adjusting the speed of my speech. That process didn't work at all. It always turned out looking horrible. I later found out that studios record the voices before they do any animation with lip movement in it. Once the studio has the recording, they slow it down to discover how much of the sound takes place in one frame and then note it on x-sheet for the animators to use later.

Thankfully, programs have been created for just this propose. Magpie is probably the most popular lip sync program. It's been used in a number of professional productions, including Corpse Bride and Creature Comforts. It's a great program, stocked with great features. The single license download costs $250 USD, and you can check it out here.

If you're unable to spend that much money, you can download JLipSync, a sweet free lip sync program for the PC and MAC. This program can be really confusing to download (at least it was for me), but luckily Marc Spess made a video tutorial outlining the downloading steps. You can check that out here.


Making your puppets talk can be a long and hard process, but if you're willing to commit your time and effort, I assure you it will be well worth it!

Stop-Motion Fun Stuff: One of my own animations

For this Fun Stuff post, I'm going to post a video I made while messing around with some blobs of clay the other day. Hope you enjoy it!

Stop-Motion News: StopMotionmagic.com's may animation challenge

StopMotionMagic.com has been doing a monthly animation exercise for the past year. The exercises were started to help animators keep their animation skills fresh. Castlegardener (the director of the exercises) noticed that a lot of the people on the site were great animators but were in need of a good puppet. He made a neat alien puppet to be awarded to the best entry in this month's animation exercise. If you're a good animator in need of a little help with puppet making, check out the challenge here.