Classes #29-30: Puppet Animation + Animation Miniatures (Stan Winston School Diary #19)

Hey, I’ve completed the filmmaking pathway! Cheers.

BUILDING MINIATURES: SMALL SCALE MODEL MAKING

Taught by Ian Hunter, who worked on Inception and The Dark Knight with Christopher Nolan, and you’ll see him on some behind the scenes iTunes download featurettes I believe, he builds a city for a Japanese inspired monster to stomp on. Now, you too can be Godzilla! We begin with the painting of buildings and go onto ideas like how to make things appear larger or smaller in the distance. I am working with cityscapes for some digital animation and can for sure use that.

A-ha! You thought Inception was all CGI? No, it wasn’t. Evidence: miniatures against a green screen during the hospital scene.

PUPPET ANIMATION TECHNIQUES

With a special cameo from an animation fellow you may know! Shhh.

My last of the Chiodo Bros. lessons (Team America: World Police), and these are looooooong. we work on how to make animated characters have human movements and working on a fully fleshed out stop motion animation film with a director, or yourself, if you are the director. At the end, we hear about how to make a Lord of the Rings effect in size illusions!

FILMMAKING PATHWAY FINAL THOUGHTS

Now that I completed this pathway…

Do I recommend the filmmaking passage for everyone at newer levels of film directing?

Yes, if you want to make animation, blockbuster films, big budget Oscar movies, or low budget sci-fi and horror. My own goals lie in the first three things I mentioned. If you want to make period pieces like Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, you might get value out of the Stan Winston' School’s hair and makeup pathways.

If we may use Mr. Nolan as an example for a minute, because his name is so frequently mentioned in these lessons probably after James Cameron and Steven Spielberg, he didn’t show up one day with an Oscar nomination for Dunkirk. And, he works a lot with a mix of CGI and practical effects for every film wanting natural reactions from his actors seeing things as they happen. If you want a career like his, this pathway might be useful to you because whatever is out there on YouTube and in major film school coursework is going to be tailored for people who want to make documentaries and dialogue-heavy movies. This isn’t a stab in the back to my fav genres because dialogue is always part of a good big budget movie; the dialogue is mixed there with the other recipe ingredients, if it were a cooking list. You could maybe take Ron Howard’s MasterClass on directing, and I haven’t taken that but read up on it with some good reviews, and it doesn’t fulfill the angle Stan Winston School’s pathway provides because this is more for people who want to have specific career goals that aren’t met with most teaching material.

I do recommend you try the techniques in these lessons to fully learn, or you aren’t doing your job as a student. Try them out in everything you ever do: animation, live action, home sampling of simple skills you stick on YouTube. Do it. Learn. Live. Love what you’re doing.