Animation Process - Girl Jam! 🌜 Puppetry of Ghosts 🌛

~I recommend reading this in a mobile device, or an email server that isn't Google if the images are too big. My email at least is not fitting the images properly into the window and I don't want to go and resize everything.~

Girl Jam! is a stop-motion parody animated short inspired by sitcoms and reality music shows like Making the Band. I animated, and it was directed, written and all vocal work performed by Asia Bey. I've chosen to write about it for my first process post because it was very DIY.

It is currently only viewable in it's entirety on Asia's Patreon at the Video+comix level (TW for violence, adult language, and nudity). I will illustrate this ~process post~ with some clips and gifs. This was my first time animating something this long using toys rather than puppets created specifically for the project, also my first time animating something written by someone else and being directed. Before animating, I received one audio track with voices and music edited together, so I could not edit the timing where different sounds overlapped. The only flexibility I had with lengthening or shortening a shot was at the silent parts of the audio. In a way, it was nice to have this constraint - All I had to do was fill in the imagery.

With animation, because each take is so time consuming - hands on every moving object (regardless of whether you are manipulating with your actual hand, a pencil, stylus or mouse), and with stop-motion the added work of setting up all the physical pieces, you want to go into the animation stage with your story fully boarded and timed. I am personally a little too impatient with the planning process. With videos that I write I usually do a storyboard that I'm happy with, then a lot of extra editing happens on the fly during the animation process, where I realize that something will be a lot of work...and you know what, I don't really need it, next! At some point I'll write about my process on my films Carrot & Pickle and Pet.

With Girl Jam, I had the audio track, a script, Asia's direction and notes, but not a fully drawn storyboard, so before animating I would do some quick thumbnails to envision the next sequence of shots, and go from there. If there were multiple shots from the same or a similar angle, I would do all of those first, to save time on setting up the camera, lighting, etc.

I did have to reanimate a couple of shots, where my interpretation of the scene differed a little too much from Asia's vision. I will share with you one scene that did not make it into the final:

Prop Making

Most of the furniture was made from cardboard. Smaller props with Sculpey clay.

The television screen, I think, is the only thing that was composited in post-production. I originally had that shot doing a slow truck-in (zoom in). Working with After Effects, green screening and such is painful for me so I like to do as much work in-camera as possible.

The scene where Shatoya boards the bus for example, I could have filmed on a green screen but instead I used a background printed from Google Maps, it was really tricky to light evenly and I still needed to do a lot of color fixing in post. The bus is one cardboard cutout replica of a shortened Pittsburgh Port Authority bus, I only needed the front to pick her up, and the back to drop her off.

Setup

I use clip-on lamps with flexible necks that I got at Ikea about 8 years ago. a couple of them are broken now at the clip, and the suction cup is dried up and breaking into bits. I still recommend these types of lamps as an inexpensive lighting option, they provide nice flexibility.

Animating with Barbies posed a few challenges. One was balancing them where I needed them to stay put. Here's is an early shot where I had Shatoya lodged into a yarn tube.

The floor in the house is a piece of papyrus. If I had a table with that kind of wood texture I could have used it bare.

Eventually I settled on balancing the dolls mostly on these hard styrofoam packaging blocks that I brought home from my job. They provided a nice wide surface that could balance nicely, and I could create a hole in each (somewhat) taylored to the size of the doll. They were still a little too easy to accidentally knock out of place due to how lightweight they are, so I usually taped them down to the surface using gaffe tape.

It was a little difficult finding Black Barbies. Target had plenty but these new barbies don't have a lot of joints to them. I got a lot of fifty something barbies from eBay, but only a few of them were really passable as 'of color'. In the end we had a good mix of new, vintage and off-brand dolls, with a mix of motion abilities that meant I had different considerations for how to use each one. The main characters were decided largely based on look by Asia, and otherwise I used dolls whose functionality met the needs of the character. The character of Shaunice Brown, for example, spends a lot of time singing on stage, so I used a doll with very flexibly jointed arms.

I hope this explanation wasn't assuming too much knowledge on the reader's part. Feel free to reply to this email if you have any questions!

In other news ~

My Principles of Animation class begins this week! Thursday at 6pm EDT. Sign up here. And check out other courses launching soon: https://hyperlink.academy/courses

A friend of mine asked a while ago for some tips on how I take care of my houseplants, and I ended up writing a really long email. I put it up here, if anyone is interested.

Graciela