Years ago, a friend and coworker, (thanks @chriscj99 ), recommended that I watch ParaNorman, a stop motion film by Laika Studios. Up until that point, I had only seen a few other stop motion films by Aardman Animations Ltd. From the moment I encountered the opening scene, in which Norman is watching a B rated horror film, I was immediately hooked by the sense of nostalgia it evoked. Growing up in the 80's and 90's, my sisters and I watched countless movies and shows, some of which included horror flicks that somehow made it into the public programming schedules. I remember watching films like They Live completely unsupervised and being gripped by the feeling of sheer terror and unsated curiosity.
Though I still believe that 3D animation/modeling will never be able to fully capture the charm and craftsmanship found in stop motion animation, I wanted to see how far I could push myself stylistically with the limited skills I have acquired these past 2 years. The sculpting was done entirely in Blender, the retopology with and addon called quadremesher, the texturing was done natively in blender, and the rigging/animating with Mixamo. The whole animation was composited in AFX. For the scene featuring Norman on a skateboard, I used an add-on by Southern Shotty's called Stop-Mo that emulates the look of stop motion animation by animating on 2s (every other frame). It seems subtle, but it makes such a huge difference!
Though I still believe that 3D animation/modeling will never be able to fully capture the charm and craftsmanship found in stop motion animation, I wanted to see how far I could push myself stylistically with the limited skills I have acquired these past 2 years. The sculpting was done entirely in Blender, the retopology with and addon called quadremesher, the texturing was done natively in blender, and the rigging/animating with Mixamo. The whole animation was composited in AFX. For the scene featuring Norman on a skateboard, I used an add-on by Southern Shotty's called Stop-Mo that emulates the look of stop motion animation by animating on 2s (every other frame). It seems subtle, but it makes such a huge difference!
