1. research

I began my research on YouTube…appropriate first because I will be posting the finished product on YouTube and second because it’s totally free. There are a lot of short stop-motion videos on YouTube many of which are done by amateurs like me. It is always important as an artist to know what has been done and what is currently being done in your field of interest. Because I believe the hardest part of this process will be making the characters look like they are actually saying and singing the attached audio, I did a search for “stop-motion dialogue”. This turned up a series of videos of student work posted by an animation teacher Ken Priebe from VanArts in Vancouver. Achieving the quality level of these videos will be my goal. They are charming because they are obviously homemade but they are also technically very well executed. They also depict a couple of different techniques for animation dialogue which I am interested in trying for myself. A link to the first video of this series is below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7MBrKb2ECQ

In the “More Info” section Ken Priebe advertises his book. The quality of his students’ work was enough to convince me that I needed to buy his book. In the meantime I decided to check out the books available at the UK Library. I was able to find a couple:

• Stop-Motion Puppet Sculpting by Tom Brierton
• Stop-Motion Filming And Performance by Tom Brierton

I also checked out some movies which I had not already seen that utilized some form of stop-motion animation from the A/V department in the library and the local video store:

• Return to Oz
• Corpse Bride
• Coraline

I read the books from the library, watched the movies, and ordered Ken Priebe’s book to begin soaking up as much animation knowledge as I could. Following will be my reviews of the books and comments about the movies.