Animating almost life-size puppets

As if animating junk sculptures for one movie did not pose enough of a challenge, we decided to do it again, the following year. The characters in Little Bang were ‘life-size’ in the sense that real objects were used to construct them: if a character had a cheese-grater for a head, that cheese-grater was a real, life-size object. Miss du Toit is an ambitious woman, and the following year her characters became life-size in the sense that they were almost as large as humans. Which is quite nice for junk sculptures. Unless you have to animate them.

Our new film Agenda requires thirteen characters seated around a table. The first challenge was to find a space to seat thirteen almost life-size characters, which suits the story without having to build a set (again no budget). The ideal space was offered to us by Chris van Niekerk, owner of the Rosendal Teater in the lovely little Free state village of Rosendal. The theater is a dignified if slightly tattered space.

Props were not that hard to come by as one often find things slightly smaller than the usual, which would then be ideal size for our characters. The big challenge was the actual distances we had to cover to animate characters – you walk on and off set the whole time, and the screen of the laptop was most of the time too far away from where one was animating for Stop motion pro to be of any use. The characters were again limited in their movements and expressions, but we worked with a much tighter script, and the characters were constructed more with the film in mind, so more moveable limbs.