A critical experience in thinking this project through was a visit made to an amazing studio here in Toronto. Working with traditional stop motion, Clyde Henry have been doing some impressive work, although their site certainly tells an incomplete picture.

But the most striking comment I heard them make when I visited in early summer was that they never – or at least rarely – reshot anything. The complexity, rigorousness and exhausting nature of the work meant that they were working in a first-take world, even if that take might take days to complete. It was, they said, just too difficult to do anything twice unless there was an actual technical problem that made a shot unusuable.

Their work makes references to animators that I also admire: The Brothers Quay and Svankmajer in particular, and I began to wonder if this one-take does it approach was universal among stop motion animators.

On the same visit, we looked at some go-motion footage, where the stop motion is based on frames shot of a moving, as opposed to still subject. The idea is to incorporate the blurring of moving elements that normally is absent from stop motion, and gives it an at times eerie, and at other times stilted look.

Animatronics was nothing new. But it aims at real time movement for the most part. Moving creatures and objects that allow actors to interact live with them. It struck me that a robotized stop-motion would be something different: moving to regular poses when stop motion was required, and also able to move on a precise trajectory and with precise timing to allow capture of blurred motion images, it wouldn’t be aimed at live interaction, but at loosening up the stop-motion animation process.

The video posted up to now has been real time video of the stop motion figure I’ve been working on, but this is not really the point. The main focus is on stop motion, with tight co-ordination of the animating controller with software that can operate high-res still cameras. The possibilities are numerous: single stop motion sequences shot from multiple angles, with lighting control incorporated for individual cameras automatically queued; distributing stop motion shooting across several stages, with multiple figures that can be composited together when done; the ability to replicate scenes shot long before (because of the ability to record and store keyframes), meaning that if a reshoot of a single figure or short sequence in a scene were necessary, it could be done, and assembled using normal digital effects.

Most important seems to me to be the idea of introducing what has been normal in cinema since Chaplin: the multiple take shooting style that allows the scene to develop and be modified to explore dramatic and comedic possibilities.

Here’s a short video of the first stop-motion prototype: a simple three jointed arm moving through a simple arc. This video was part of a series of experiments to see if the jerkiness that is evident in real time movement of a servo driven puppet would disappear in stop motion. Also visible is my assistant, Igor.