Drop Out is a 3-minute stop-motion animation that took many months to make. We caught up with the six talented (and patient!) students who created it to find out more about them and their fascinating art.
Tell us about yourselves. Where are you from? How did you get into CG? How did you meet?
We are animation students in the master programme at the University of Applied Sciences Hagenberg in Austria. We all have a bachelor's degree in media-related fields, but Drop Out was our first serious animation ever.
Bernadette and Jennifer have a background in real-life photography and still pursue a career in this field rather than the CG world.
Katja, Johannes and Sven are the people who are really crazy about 3D and definitely will try to make a living doing CG. Rafael sways between experimental animation techniques and writing/directing.
We met in the master's programme, only the three girls knew each other before since they had studied together for three years in the bachelor's programme of Hagenberg, which is Media-technology and -design.
Drop Out was Rafael's pre-production project in the first term of his studies and the whole group's project for the course "animation-production" in the second term.
What inspired you to create the surreal horror animation Drop Out?
We have been heavily influenced by different artworks. To name the most important:
- Terry Gilliams Brazil,
- Andrew Niccols Gattaca,
- Jan Svankmajer's whole portfolio of crazy surreal stop-mo animations,
- Philipp K. Dick novels,
- the wonderful work of H.R. Giger.
- and Dark polish animations like the cathedral, moloch or fallen art (all by Platige Images).
But also in general these dark atmospheric animations from eastern Europe, surrealism and all kinds of science fiction stuff have a big influence on us.
Since we're all from Austria (except Sven, who's from Germany) we'll always have the Second World War in the back of our heads and therefore the whole WWII happenings are reflected in the animation.
Besides art, churches influenced the building of the tunnel a lot. As for the story, the director (Rafael Mayrhofer) drew on his experiences of being an outsider in school - reflecting on the phenomenon he realised that at some point in personal development people don't try to fit in so much any more but merely try to develop their own interesting pseudo-individual personality. He tried to treat this subject in an abstract way.
Since we're all from Austria (except Sven, who's from Germany) we'll always have the Second World War in the back of our heads and therefore the whole WWII happenings are reflected in the animation. Not only in the general story but also in the character of the surveillance camera - it not only acts as an overseer for the whole complex but also has a modified symbol of a swastika on it.
You created the animation with old-fashioned stop motion. Why did you choose to do it this way?
The Drop Out set CG has this general tendency to look very clean and flawless, but with the whole subject being "the imperfect" stop motion made much more sense. This way the concept didn't only reflect better in the design but also in the animation, since stop motion always has these little mistakes where the crispy vibrancy in the animation comes from.
It was a hell of a lot of work, but we think it supports the story very well. We're strong believers that technique should always derive from the concept and not the other way around. Starting with "I want to make a 3D animation, let's build a story around this" isn't really the way we approach our projects.
What planning and preparation did you have to go through before the shoot? Did you make any mistakes?
StoryboardHell, yes! We made so many mistakes and learned so much from them. We've never done anything like this before so it was a big trial and error process. Well, since there were no characters to animate in the real set, mistakes didn't tend to have a dramatic effect on the shots. In character animation there is no happy mistake, but when it comes to artificial items I would rethink this statement.
We did write exact lists with frame numbers to animate the items and the light. The crucial part really was the lighting - we did animate it traditionally and only enhanced it digitally. So we had planned out on which frame which light had to have how much intensity, and we had a prepared storyboard for each shot which defined in great detail which exact angle the camera had to take.
The only real mistakes turned out to be wrong lighting animations, which we double checked after each shot. Sometimes shots looked good on paper with the frame numbers and everything, but had too much of a disco atmosphere in reality. But since the shots are under a 2 seconds' average we just re-did the shots immediately after, which sounds like nothing for a film/video-filmmaker, but means throwing away two to three hours' of hard work for a stop-motion animator.
The last few shots with the camera movement down into the breeding room turned out to be the most tricky ones. So many things went wrong I don't even want to get started with this...let me just tell you this: we thought we planned out everything perfectly and would simply shoot it, and then all of a sudden things we couldn't even imagine would be difficult became horrifying problems. The lighting wouldn't work the way we planned, our camera rig turned out to be too small to go the whole distance of the camera movement, the clumsy barbie wouldn't sit still with her elastic monster legs, etc. This shot alone took about four days to shoot it right.
How did you create the set?
Materials used to build the setThe sets were created in about 4 months by Rafael and Jennifer. At first we only had the basic sketches and dimensions of the whole tunnel. Luckily the University provided us with a big room, which became our workshop. There we stapled all kinds of scrap metal, cables and mechanical/electronic garbage we found in auto repair shops and on garbage dump sites which sort waste in Austria very carefully - the people there turned out to be very open minded about crazy student projects! From there on it was a pretty straightforward process. We built the basic construct out of banana cartons and chose the details to be added while doing it. It felt a lot like playing with lego again - we basically had different boxes with assorted little pieces and built pieces with imaginative functionality while combining the things with glue. Before gluing things on the set we sprayed them with white colour and painted the whole set white. So we had the maximum amount of light-bouncing going on in the tunnel and the full possibility to colourise it in post production.
You added the dolls and camera with CG. How did you do that and what software did you use?
Reference testFor the shots with camera movement we used Boujou to have 3D tracks. As a matter of fact these shots were much easier than the shots with a still-standing camera. After 3D tracking you have a bunch of locators that define the whole scene and it's just a matter of fine adjusting.
For the shots without a moving camera we had take exact measurements of the set and where the camera was located. We also took one picture per shot with a lego cube in it as a reference. With the calculations we could easily place the camera in our 3D scene on the right spot.
The next step was to use the image with the lego cube as a semi-transparent background plane for the previously placed camera. With a simple poly cube that had the same measurements as the real lego cube, we could then eyeball the camera so that the lego cube on the background plane would exactly overlap the 3D cube in the scene, and voila! Of course there was some detail work to do, like measuring the focal length for each shot, so that the 3D camera would have almost the same angle of view. Fine adjustments with correcting the distortion of the lens had also to be done.
The post production process took place in After Effects, which is a nice compositing software, but when working with over 100 layers per shot it gets really slow. So for our next project we will give the node-based software Fusion a try, which we've already checked out - it made a good impression in terms of performance on us.
Do you have any tricks or advice you can share with readers who might want to create a stop motion animation?
LightingMaybe a basic attitude advice: "outcome justifies all self-torturing". Bring a lot, and I mean TONS, of patience when you do stop motion. I could really ellaborate on this topic on more than ten pages, but it basically comes down to this: patience is the key. Have a good plan about what you do before you do it and don't hesitate to do the work of a couple of hours again if something goes wrong.
When you experience the moment, when you just want to kick it all to hell because you have to do it all over because you accidently touched the table and everything fell apart, think of this: everybody who does serious stop-motion has been there before. You have just not been concentrating enough and your project is testing your will to finish it. On the positive side, you get an enormous satisfaction after working on 3 seconds' of animation for 6 hours and see it for the first time.
Tricks: we tried different programs to capture the pictures and in the end we used the software that comes with the DSLR itself. There is this Canon EOS Utility-Program which does a pretty good job and the Nikon equivalent is very nice too. It's definitely a good thing to plug your camera into a computer and capture the pictures with it - it gives you the ability to blend the pictures taken and check the movement frame by frame.
Other than that, problems and questions that crop up are always project specific - I am no expert myself, but if there's a specific question we're always happy to help colleagues out. Simpy contact us via our website where you'll find our contact details.
What are you planning to do next? Another animation? Will it be another surreal horror?
Yes, I think from now on, there will be only few moments in the near future, when we are not in the production of an animation. Currently three of us: Rafael, Sven and Katja are working together with another very passionate colleague of ours on our diploma project. We are about to finish up the pre-production now after 5 months. It will be even more surreal, even more sci-fi and very, very dark, but not horror. And then there's this music video ... and this other thing ... and ... well:
Big things to come! Stay connected and make sure to check it out!
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| Rafael Mayrhofer |
Sven Skoczylas |
Katja Flachberger |
Johannes |
Bernadette Fellner |
Jennifer Weixler |
