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.

Stop-Motion How To: Making Puppets Talk, Part 1 of 2

Over the years, many ways have been developed to make a stop-motion puppet talk. One of the earlier and more difficult methods is one in which the animator re-sculpts his puppet's mouth to the desired shape while in the middle of the animating process. Doing so doubles or triples the time the animator spends on a scene. This technique can look great if you're good at re-sculpting, but it isn't a good idea to have your focus on sculpting when it should be on animating.

Probably the easiest technique is one in which the animator creates a puppet whose mouth can be opened and closed and then animates his speech by just propping the mouth open and then closing it, without worrying about the lips, teeth, or tongue. This technique is easy to accomplish, but it usually makes the puppet look like a weird robot from a B horror movie. Unless that's what you're going for I would strongly recommend avoiding this technique.

The best technique I have seen uses the the replacement mouth method which has been adopted by almost all of the larger stop-motion studios. In the replacement mouth method, the sculptor cuts out the puppet's mouth and sculpts replacement mouths that fit where he cut out the original mouth. After he's finished sculpting all his mouths, he gives them to the animator, who then inserts the correct mouth shape in each frame in order to shape the words his puppet is saying. This way, the animator and the sculptor have plenty of time to add as much detail as they want. When I first heard of this method I thought it would take a tremendous amount of time sculpting 26 different mouths. But I was soon enlightened to the fact that the mouth only needs to make 8 basic shapes to speak fluently. Check out this paper, which shows which mouth shapes sound the same and how to sculpt them.

A technique similar to replacement mouths is drawing the mouth shapes on a piece of paper and adhering it to the puppet's mouth area. Surprisingly, this method tends to be quite cartoonish and funny looking.



One of the hardest things in the process of making puppet's talk is getting the recorded voice to match up with the lip movements. In Part Two of this post, we will look into some of the ways to archive lip syncing.

Stop-Motion Fun Stuff: The Animated Animation Tutorial

Check out Battenball's cute very basic Animated stop-motion tutorial.