# Off-Topic Discussion > Artists' Corner >  >  Darkmatters' Puppet Theatre

## Darkmatters

Ambiance by Darkmatters, on Flickr

A test shot for my upcoming film *Cosmo's*, featuring the puppets from my sigpic - mainly just working out lighting issues here

Welcome to the microcosm of the puppet theatre... a tradition spanning way back into the antiquity of history and claiming an important place in Man's relationship to art and to magic. Puppet theatre has existed alongside it's full-sized counterpart from the beginning, emerging from their roots in fetishes and tribal masks wielded by shamans in the telling of their tales - the working of their majicks. In Europe traveling troupes would push their carts from town to town and put on their puppetshows, receiving scraps of food and coins for their efforts, and mending puppets between shows with whatever materials were available to them. There was actually a very common material called Composition that many puppets were made from consisting largely of potato starch and other food products - often the puppet maker/actor/showmen would go hungry in order to repair a broken nose or ear for the next show. 

This tradition existed alongside the famed Commedia Del Arte, exchanging ideas between them and strengthening each other in the process, and eventually led to famous productions like Punch and Judy - almost direct precursors to some of the early Eastern European puppetfilm animations that serve as my greatest inspiration. I have examples of lots of clips from these European gems on my site at Darkstrider.net (sorry for the repetitive dark-age, yeah I'm a big dork!). Also feel free to explore my YouTube page (all videos below will not surprisingly be featured there as well) and my blog where I delve into related subjects, including discussion about all aspects of making a stopmotion film as well as occasionally posting some behind the scenes on my upcoming film. Oh, and how could I forget, my Flickr page, featuring still images of my work and test shots as I work out lighting details etc (plus a few shots of my dog Pepper). 

I'm currently working on what I consider my first _real_ film, so everything that's gone before has been exercises and tests and microfilms... but still fun to watch. Well, without further ado, here are a few clips I've done over the years:



This is my first microfilm, done for a contest me and a few friends created (yes, we entered films into our own contest, but we disqualified ourselves from winning). One of the keywords was Shoes, which might help explain the ending. 




Ok, enough for the first post. Ill add to this gradually. Check back for more.

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## Darkmatters

_1000661 by Darkmatters, on Flickr

Testing new camera with an old puppet


Stop motion animation isn't a skill.... it's many skills combined. For a one-man production like I am, you basically have to be able to do everything an entire film production crew and cast does... to an extent anyway. You're the writer, director, editor, you have to act every part (in super-slow motion, a frame at a time) - you do the camera and lighting, editing, sound, any special effects - carpentry, set design and dressing, electrician, costumes hair and makeup... plus a few specialized jobs that aren't required on regular filmmaking... you need to be able to make little flexible puppets and animate them. It's a lot to learn! But thankfully it's all in miniature, which does help. 

One of the things I love about stopmotion that makes it totally unique... in drawn animation or CGI you start by creating keyframes and then fill in the in-betweens... if you don't like the way something is moving you can just pull out a few frames and insert new ones... you can endlessly tweak and correct until you get exactly what you want. But in stopmotion you just have to do it the old fashioned way... start with frame 1 and shoot one at a time until the shot is done. There's no inserting or modifying frames... so you're actually creating a real performance - albeit in extreme slow motion. 
Just like in a live performance, if you start to mess up you find a way to make it work.. or just scrap the shot and start all over again. In this way the animator's personality comes through much more so than in a cartoon or CGI scene, which are usually created by many people and can then be re-worked ad infinitum (especially in CG, where a producer can just say "I don't like the way he's moving here... can we make it look more like Transformers?"). I also love the idea that animation is compressed time... months or years of a creator's life go into a few minutes of screen time... all the work and effort, the sweat and frustration and the triumphs and tragedies you encounter along the way go into it. 

Ok, enough rambling... more animation!! 




Race the Wind

My Buster Keaton puppet. This was going to be for that same contest site the last one was for, but I never finished it. It's ok... it was mostly me working out how to do a certain kind of effect - the puppet and hat are actually stationary and the background is what's moving. Here's a little behind-the-scenes on the making of: Running Rig tutorial

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## XeL

Holy shit, this is awesome!

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## Darkmatters

Thanks! Glad you like it!

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## Darkmatters

P1020968 by Darkmatters, on Flickr
Into the Void


To me these little films are like dreams. I think that's why I love stopmotion so much. Even in the days before computer-based framegrabber programs made it easy to get animation smooth (well. relatively easy anyway... still rather difficult!) - like for instance King Kong or the fantastic creatures of Ray Harryhausen, or the more modern (but still pre-computer age) Nightmare Before Christmas. Watching animated films is like dreaming (well, as long as they're artistically-done films, not commercial garbage made only for a buck). But MAKING them is like lucid dreaming! And like lucid dreaming, it can take years to learn to control them...

Here are a few test shots and practice sessions I've done:




Hoppy head turn test

See, this is an example of something I didn't realize was happening until I was done and watched the clip... his neck totally spazz's out!! Rotational motion is hard! Now I know...




Skull Love 

This is the one where I learned how to animate smoooth, after the first step or two. Developed my animator's patience. And once I had it, I decided to still everything except one hand... a finger at a time moving. This is something extremely hard for a newbie (like I was) to have the patience for. That patience marks the difference between a beginner and a pro or semi-pro. 




One Good Yank

Animation is all about movement and posturing... skills that can be learned by studying mime. Oh, and kids... ya gotta make sure your lights don't move around while you're animating!   ::lol::

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## eppy

how do you make your puppets? i love them. reminds me of nightmare before christmas.

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## juroara

Fun! The skull love is my favorite. Although I think in One Good Yank you're really mastering movement and the illusion of gravity.

I've always loved this type of animation because of the real lighting. I hate it when I watch a CGI movie and all I can notice is the shadows are way off. So even if this is a slower method, I think there are some real advantages. You get to use real light!

I wanna make a mini movie too. I wanted to sculpt a landscape, and then make a short film with the camera flying over and inside the landscape. But my sculpting skills suck  :Sad:

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## Darkmatters

> how do you make your puppets? i love them. reminds me of nightmare before christmas.



Thanks eppy. Took me a long time to learn how to build those little suckers - here's the posts on my blog about how I made them:

Darkmatters: Puppet building

Darkmatters: Puppet building2

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## Darkmatters

> Fun! The skull love is my favorite. Although I think in One Good Yank you're really mastering movement and the illusion of gravity.
> 
> I've always loved this type of animation because of the real lighting. I hate it when I watch a CGI movie and all I can notice is the shadows are way off. So even if this is a slower method, I think there are some real advantages. You get to use real light!
> 
> I wanna make a mini movie too. I wanted to sculpt a landscape, and then make a short film with the camera flying over and inside the landscape. But my sculpting skills suck



YES!!! Absolutely! THANK YOU!!! 

_REAL LIGHT

REAL TEXTURES

REAL OBJECTS in a REAL ENVIRONMENT actually CONTACTING EACH OTHER._ 

That's what makes stop motion magic for me! CG is getting pretty amazing, a far cry from its early days, but I almost always get an _artificial_ feeling from it. Plus for whatever reason, the entire Cg industry seems to be obsessed with REALISM and extreme detail. I gotta say, one of my favorite CG features in recent memory was actually Horton Hears a Who - because the characters were stylized and done as cartoons, you didn't see every skin pore and tiny hair. 

I love the idea of flying a camera over and through a miniature landscape!! I'm obsessed with landscape myself, especially dark nighttime landscapes peppered with clusters of lights (as you might remember from my Nightscapes photos). And I WILL do a film like that one day!! 

One Good Yank is my latest microfilm, and I do feel I'm good enough now at smooth movement and basically making characters move in believable ways, but I want them to be able to _ACT_!! And I don't think I can get that until I'm actually animating in the context of a story as opposed to just little tests and microshorts.

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## Am I dreaming

These are awesome! wish you had more! they're so entertaining. The lighting is great, lends the films a creepy atmosphere  ::D: 

and love how he scratches his arse in 'Skull Love'! lol

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## Darkmatters

Moar you say? 

Ok. Some of my early tests. Sorry, these are quicktimes, not hosted at YouTube or anything, and I can't seem to embed them. Ya gotta go oldschool and click the links. These are with my Captain Ahab puppet. First up, a couple with him working at the forge:

Hammertest 2

Hammertest 6

Larger silent movie style test

Ok I hear ya... enough with the hammering already!! A couple of random tests:

Coiling up rope

Apparition

Walk test 2

End of the matter

Swaying deck test

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## Arch

Epic, but it's some creepy shit man!

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## Darkmatters

Creepy?   :Shades wink: 

Well, it ain't Disney, that's fer sure!! Somebody has to start to undo all the damage done by sugary-sweet "children's" animation! And if you ask me, what I do is a lot classier than all this "sick and twisted" animation that's all over the airwaves these days... now THAT stuff is creepy!!   ::lol::

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## Arch

> Creepy?  
> 
> Well, it ain't Disney, that's fer sure!! Somebody has to start to undo all the damage done by sugary-sweet "children's" animation! And if you ask me, what I do is a lot classier than all this "sick and twisted" animation that's all over the airwaves these days... now THAT stuff is creepy!!



Fair play dude, fair play.

Edit: Still wouldn't want one of those turning up in my dreams.

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## Darkmatters

Alright you know what? I accept creepy. I guess it's basically what I'm going for, I just usually use different terms for it like dark, mysterious, surreal, haunting etc. But I guess that's basically what people mean when they say creepy. So Booya!!   ::goodjob2::

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## Oneironaut Zero

These are amazing, man. CG politics aside (being a digital artist, myself, lol), I love and respect practical effects and animation, just as much. You've got real talent; from your modeling; to your lighting; and down to your animation. I really like the finger movements on Skull Love. Can only imagine how difficult that was to do right. 

Excellent work!  ::goodjob2::

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## Evolventity

I flipped through most of your pics on flikr a couple days ago. Very impressing and intriguing. Inspires me to pick up a hobby.

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## Darkmatters

Thanks O! I honestly don't have any problem with CG itself at all... in fact when it's well done I love it and consider it an art form all its own. What does annoy me though is how much total crap CG is pumped out all the time in the lower-budget films (sci-fi channel, I'm lookin at YOU!   :Mad: ). On the stopmo message board where I hang out there's a strong core group of CG haters, mostly guys who lost their jobs in the industry when it took over in the monster movie business, though there are also quite a few stopmo animators who made the transition - case in point Phil Tippett. 

But for me personally, I was already hooked on stopmo before CGI even existed, and it's largely due to the same reasons I love dreams. There's a certain intense surrealism just in the way the puppets move... even in the shows I loved as a kid like Gumby (very surreal actually!) and Davey and Goliath. Just something about the sculptural/textural qualities, and the stylized movement, that when I got a bit older drew me to the amazing creature films of Ray Harryhausen, and to King Kong etc. Those movies are like some bizarre dream creatures emerging into the normal human world and wreaking havoc. 

But I had an epiphany in the early 90's when I discovered the magical and fantastic world of Eastern European Puppetfilm - in particular the films of the Brothers Quay (not officially Eastern Euro, but they do it better then the Europeans themselves do!) and Jan Svankmajer and the Tool music videos, which are very similar to the work of the Quays. Heh, I'd post some videos of some of it here but it would just make my work look bad! I might make a thread about it somewhere though. This purely miniature world that's obviously created by artists and populated entirely by living puppets is what captivates me the most... to me it's more like actually being totally immersed in a dream.

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## Darkmatters

> I flipped through most of your pics on flikr a couple days ago. Very impressing and intriguing. Inspires me to pick up a hobby.



Thanks Evo (if I may be so informal). A hobby is a great thing. In fact, I've heard it said that only 2 things can keep a person from madness... a romantic relationship or being an artist. Apparently they're the only things that stir the soul deeply enough. Of course art being an extremely broad term covering a lot of territory.

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## Unelias

It is surprising, in a very good way, to see that you are chosen to practice this tradition. Those are great! Also, for you doing everything by yourself you have my respect. I definetly check your blog  :smiley:

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## DeletePlease

Do you do requests? My little Pony: Friendship Is Magic? Cute redheads making out? Gavin with a girlfriend?

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## Darkmatters

Gavin, I hate you so much right now...  ::sniper::

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## DeletePlease

You spent an hour constantly clicking replay, didn't you? I know I did.

Seriously though, that's pretty cool. One Good Yank kind of creeps me out though.  :tongue2:

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## Darkmatters

Come on... it was only 45 minutes for me...   :paranoid:

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## LudoSiren

I hope this isn't at all insulting, but your work kind of reminds me of that of Tim Burton. most of all one of his earliest pieces: a short film called _Vincent_. Your style has a sort of twisted storybook feel to it, and your bits seem delightfully dark in a way that gives them some shock-value, but also a Halloween-y charm.
I'm definately going to be looking for your short, Cosmo's!

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## Darkmatters

That's not insulting at all!!! I love Vincent, and of course Nightmare Before Christmas!! I can hardly wait to see the new version of Frankenweenie, being made in black and white, entirely in stopmo, and in 3d!!!

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## LudoSiren

Wait...That's being done?! Now I'm looking forward to that too! Frankenweenie was so adorable! I'm a bit of a nerd for TB's work...I think the only thing I haven't seen by him is Big Fish. I literally grew up off of his movies, and the spinoff cartoon to his movie Beetlejuice. 
You have fantastic taste, sir. I tip my hat to you!

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## Darkmatters

Thank you! 

Big fish... I'd say you're not missing much. I don't know... it was meh... alright I guess. I didn't really care for it that much though.

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## LudoSiren

No problem!
And I've heard that about it....But I still want to see it anyway  :smiley:

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## Taosaur

Very cool. The first thing I thought of was this old Tool video:

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## Darkmatters

Oh yeah!!! Thanks Tausaur! Had to watch that one with the volume cranked up. *Definitely* one of my biggest influences. 

Done by Fred Sturh (RIP) and Adam Jones. Sturh animated the video for Sober, then Jones (Tool guitarist) helped out on this and a couple more before Sturh's tragic death in a car accident, then Jones took over their videos from there. He's an artist (visual I mean as well as musical) and has some connection to movie special effects. True story... for the shot where the bee is crawling on the hand of the black puppet, they put the bee in a refrigerator for a while to slow its metabolism, then they just animated the hand and let the bee walk around really SLOOOOOooooooooow.  

Ok, since you posted this here (and thankfully on the 2nd page where my work doesn't have to stand direct comparison!   :Oh noes: ) I think I'll put up a few videos by some other influences that are less familiar. 

.. And Ludo, it's definitely worth seeing. Just didn't stand up to his better films.

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## Darkmatters

Prepare yourself for this (if that's possible). *Most. Intoxicating. Film. Ever. Made.* There are no words.









Maybe people on Dreamviews will actually like this. The majority of people I show it to... even those who love the Tool videos, just get a pissed-off look after a few seconds and say "WTF is this??!!" This is actually the strongest influence on Fred Sturh for the Sober video as well as on hundreds of other artists (including Marilyn Manson). 

... It's called SURREALISM people!! I KNOW you don't get the story - there ISN'T one!! 
Actually it is based very loosely on the story of the same name by Polish author Bruno Schulz, which itself is a fantastic work of surrealism (and actually does have a recognizable story to it) - but the Bros went way afield here and just used the imagery and ideology from the book (plus another of Schulz's masterpieces - I believe it was Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass) and went completely nuts with it. I cannot get enough of this, and it will forever be my Holy Grail - the perfection towards which I will reach and never attain. 



One of Schulz's innumerable amazing quotes:





> "There are things than cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to loose their integrity in the frailty of realization. "
>  Bruno Schulz (Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass)






I am stunned into silence.

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## Darkmatters

Svankmajer is the leader of the Czech Surrealists (or was) and here he demonstrates their creed - they place strong emphasis on the violence and sensuality of childhood dreams and fantasy, elements that are normally ignored or fearfully repressed by society, and they look to Lewis Carrol as one of the seminal surrealists. 

Svankmajer also served as the main inspiration for the Brothers Quay (above).  

His visual style is abrupt and sometimes disturbing, there's a strong insistence on textures and surfaces and a chorus of natural sounds amplified to make them strange - and if you give in to the dreamlike spell of it and let it carry you, it will take you to a very dreamlike space.

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## Darkmatters

As always, pleases click through to YouTube to see this fullscreen, and to see the other parts. 

One of the most astonishing puppetfilms to come from the Czech Republic or all of Eastern Europe for that matter. Like most of them, this is entirely told through pantomime and has no dialogue aside from some gibberish language invented for the purpose. It uses a mix of semi-flat bas-relief style puppets and fully 3D ones plus some dead rats with wires jammed into them to make them animatable. Probably not the best idea.. many of the animators got violently ill and had to take sick days. 

But the result is strange, surreal, and startlingly beautiful. Czech animation is meant for an adult audience and often delves into deep literary/philosophical areas and is unafraid to deal with dark frightening aspects of life.  

God I love this stuff!!

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## NoDaniel

...We've got another Tim Burton in the world
You have an amazing talent! DON'T STOP >:O

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## Darkmatters

Why thank you sir!! 

.. And Gaga!

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## LudoSiren

Absolutely demented are your inspirations!
...And I love it!
Your inspirations are so sophisticated, making your art very fine. I'm kind of jealous! You drew from great and strange things, and created a very pronounced style for yourself with it! I always wanted to try my hand at puppets....But for now I either paint, illustrate, or make leather masks. I would love to see more work from you! And if you need any leather pieces for your puppets....I'm your girl! XD

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## Darkmatters

I actually have mixed emotions about posting these influences/inspirations here. It's all so 'horrifically beautiful' and immensely powerful that it makes my own work seem pitiful in comparison!! But when I look at my early work and then the pictures of my most recent stuff I can see I'm getting there. Heh, so I'm glad this is on page 2 all grouped together. 

I'm stunned that you make leather masks! Like Mardi-Gras type? Those are amazingly beautiful... I love anything made from natural materials especially using an old-world technique. Do you wet the leather and stretch it over wooden forms? I know there are other approaches, but that's one I really love to see. In fact - strange synchronicity maybe, but I was considering posting one more clip here - something done by Ladislas Starevitch, who was doing this stuff pretty close the the dawn of the motion picture itself and made tiny little garment-leather masks for his puppets that allowed the mouths to move and the facial expressions to be animated using tweezers...  :Eek:

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## Darkmatters

Born Polish, emigrated to Russia and then to France - there are multiple spellings of his name as a result of all this chaotic cultural upheaval, but in any language, his work is pure genius!! As mentioned in the last post, he used garment leather to make the faces, stretched and sewn over wooden forms and then animated the facial expressions using tweezers (there are of course also wires inside). 

He's generally credited with being one of the first people to actually make and animate puppets specially designed for the purpose... simultaneous with (but completely independent from and with no knowledge of) Jiri Trnka in the Czech Republic and one or two others - I'm too lazy to check on that right now but I believe one was Willis O'Brien, Irish/American most famous for his pioneering work on King Kong. 

This folk tale brought brilliantly to life is one of the most gorgeous films ever made in many people's opinion (including my own).

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## LudoSiren

I do wet the leather, but the lather-scrap I buy is a bit thick for stretching. In my case, I shape the wet leather to the contours of a persons face (usually when it's custom for them), or I shape it to the face of my styrofoam head who I have named Chuck Norris. After that, they are propped up in the oven and painted when they are all baked through. The masks can be mardi-gras, certainly. So far the masks I've made are just the eye-maks tied with a ribbon, and two custom-shaped ones (a 'Phantom of the Opera'-esque half-face mask and a Gaga-esque mask with a strange custom cut....It's hard to explain. It covered her left eye, the brdige went across her nose, and then it only covered her right cheek down to her chin....Pure hell to shape and stand for baking, let me tell you!) I can certainly show you some samples. At the moment, I am beginning to put up some masks on eBay soon. Otherwise the ones I've made were for people for my Junior prom and as gifts. But yes, I can certainly show you samples of those as well! Just shoot me a message!

And by the by- you shouldn't feel self-concious with your inspirations. Think of it as motivation- and you're doing well! Your work isn't pale in comparison, it shines and showss character!

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## BobbyLance

Just wondering around DV until I stumbled upon this thread. This is epic man! I salute you! Anyways, how many frames per sec is this?

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## Darkmatters

Thanks!! I started off working at 15 FPS, which is just about the lowest number that still looks like actual smooth movement. Then after a while I graduated to 24 FPS - which is actual movie film framerate. Heh I know, I know... I don't plan to ever actually shoot anything on real movie film, couldn't afford it anyway! But now with Blu -Ray you actually can watch at 24p, and I feel that framerate gives the animation a more "film-like" look.

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## Sorcer

Team America !!  heheh.  nice work man.  I wish i had a decent internet connection so i could watch more of the clips you posted... (including your inspirations)  I really liked your signature picture, took me a moment to be less oblivious and realize that you actually created it's contents.  Awesome.

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## Darkmatters

F**k Yeah!!  :Rock out: 

Thanks Shawn! And I'm glad you mentioned my signature pic, cause I have to admit - I didn't actually make those heads. I did make everything else in my clips, and I made the bodies *under* the heads, but they were actually made by an amazing sculptor/marionette maker named Scott Radke. I'm a huge fan of his work, and I still can't believe I get to animate these crazy things!! Here's his website: Marionettes by Scott Radke

And just to be clear - I *did* make the head in my avatar pic!

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## Kuhnada29

What's up DarkMatters, I'm looking at your animations .._very_ good. Reminds me of James and The Giant Peach lol.  If you want to work together let me know, I make music scores your animation films

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## greenhavoc

Meh ..j/k

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## Robot_Butler

Oh shit.  I didn't realize this was you.  I've come across your stuff before.  I think I stumbled across your website a while back while browsing art and animation websites.  I recognized the hammer .gif you had for a while as your avatar, but didn't think you actually made it.  Wow, you're totally famous in my mind.

Do you do anything related to this, professionally?  Or is this a hobby?  You should definitely be doing this professionally if you are not already.

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## Darkmatters

Hey thanks Robot_Butler!!  :Happy: 

Well I'd have to call it more than a hobby, I consider myself a serious amateur. This isn't any kind of insult - really the main difference between professional and amateur is whether you do it for money or not. And often the amateurs are really the ones who do the most interesting work, because they're doing it strictly for love of the craft and aren't bound by constraints of time and "rule by committee" that can cook all the life out of a professional production, even though it has almost unlimited budget and talent. I decided early on that I would never do this professionally, because as soon as you're doing it for money you become a slave to the money man. I used to make airbrushed T shirts and I learned the hard way that letting other people make decisions that you as an artist have to obey means you're selling out your integrity. And I refuse to do that in my animation. 

Basically the only way a stopmotion animator could make a decent living today is by working on shows like Robot Chicken (hey, any relation?   :Cheeky: ) and the like, which doesn't appeal to me at all. Yeah, there are the big movies like Coraline and Corpse Bride, but guess what? The animators and crew who work on those are basically recruited form the talent poo (lol I meant pool - but I'll leave that rather humorous Freudian slip there!) who have to make Robot Chicken! It's the same as Nightmare Before Christmas - believe it or not, when they formed a production company and started hiring talent, they recruited form the pool of animators and fabricators who were working on Gumby! Yeah, those guys are doing what they love for a living too, but most of them are happy just to push puppets around and have no ambitions toward directing or writing their own material, or being in charge of lighting and set design etc. Personally I don't even want to do this unless I can make films that really appeal to me, and I think looking at what I do you can see I wouldn't be happy with the cartoonish look and lighting and the slapstick mentality of Robot Chicken (as much respect and admiration as I do have for the talented people who make that show).  Some of the guys hwo work there also make their own films in their free time, and it can be astonishing how different their personal work is! 

But to me, I'd rather work a day job in order to be able to afford to do what I want with my time (if I can ever break away from my DV addiction long enough that is!!   :Oh noes: ) and then labor for months or years to make a single short film that I can be proud of.

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## Robot_Butler

I know exactly what you mean.  Humans are cursed with this problem.  As soon as you start doing what you love for money, you stop loving it.  I always joke about it with my friends.  Even if you work in a creative industry, you always have to keep something separate that you do only for yourself.   I only ask, because stop motion seems like one of those things that requires an impossibly huge skill set.  I can't imagine how you could get into something like that without having a day job that is somehow related.  I am impressed.

Your stuff reminds me of some of Dave McKean's darker work.  In fact, I think he even illustrated a Punch & Judy comic book a few years ago.

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## Darkmatters

Yeah! Mr. Punch! I've got that one, and I love it!!!

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## IndieAnthias

Oh... wow I'm glad I saw this in your signature. This is fantastic, I am inspired bro.

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## Darkmatters

Thanks Indie! I'm glad you saw it too!  :Happy: 

Heh - I want to animate your sig pic!!

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## IndieAnthias

hell yes, that would be rad!

Here's the source, knock yourself out.

File:Swordfish skeleton.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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## Darkmatters

Heh cool - grabbed it. I started to make a whale skeleton once - just a few ribs. I'd like to finish it one day. Did you see the animal skeleton animation on the last page? Not by me - it's by a guy named Svankmajer that I wish I could be.

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## IndieAnthias

> Heh cool - grabbed it. I started to make a whale skeleton once - just a few ribs. I'd like to finish it one day. Did you see the animal skeleton animation on the last page? Not by me - it's by a guy named Svankmajer that I wish I could be.



I'm still reading/watching through all of it...  :Cheeky:

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## DeeryTheDeer

Oh my god, HOW did I not notice this before? Yay, another animator on DV!! I myself am trying to get into the industry as a CG character animator (but I really want to be an auteur filmmaker, kind of like what you're doing). From what I've seen on this thread, you are seriously talented, as well as skilled, which makes it even better.





> But for me personally, I was already hooked on stopmo before CGI even existed, and it's largely due to the same reasons I love dreams. There's a certain intense surrealism just in the way the puppets move... even in the shows I loved as a kid like Gumby (very surreal actually!) and Davey and Goliath. Just something about the sculptural/textural qualities, and the stylized movement, that when I got a bit older drew me to the amazing creature films of Ray Harryhausen, and to King Kong etc. Those movies are like some bizarre dream creatures emerging into the normal human world and wreaking havoc.



That's interesting. I was also very into stop motion animation, mainly when I was a kid, and was at one point convinced that the stop motion medium would be my future career (around the time when Chicken Run came out)... until I tried a CG program, and instantly fell head over heels in love with the CG world, and it's infinite mathematical possibilities. I feel like CGI aptly represents my dreams, even my weirdest childhood dreams from as far back as I can remember. Even if CG wasn't the big kid on the playground that it is today, I think I'd still be crazy about it. So don't let me near your hater friends, because that stuff makes me livid, like I'm defending a boyfriend, haha.

Granted, I still love stop motion a great deal and want to try it again, but I want the movements to be smooth, 24 frames a second, which is obviously harder, but the results to me are mind blowing.

Anyway, good luck with your project. Do you have any animation up yet to see?

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## DeletePlease

For some reason, I really want to see you create some stop-motion porn. 

Don't judge me.

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## Darkmatters

Thank you!! That means a lot coming form an artist and someone who's interested in animation herself. 

I really dig some kinds of CG - especially when it's not trying to be realistic. I really loved Horton Hears a Who because it took place in a stylized cartoon world and the characters actually used squash and stretch quite well. And from your caricatures it looks like you have some cartooning skills. Also judging from your sig pic it looks like you have great taste in animation art!! 





> Granted, I still love stop motion a great deal and want to try it again, but I want the movements to be smooth, 24 frames a second, which is obviously harder, but the results to me are mind blowing.



The funny thing about that is - people always say "Wow, stop motion must take so much PATIENCE!!" .. .and in a way it does, but in a way it's not like that at all. It's more like once you get in the zone and find the right rhythm for it time ceases to have any meaning while you're working, and you find you can finesse the tiniest movements over and over if you have to to get them perfect (if perfection is your thing - I actually lean more toward slightly imperfect but appealing movement though I did go though a super-smooth phase along the learning curve). But of course, once you're done with a shot and you come out of that zone you find most of a day has gone by in what felt like an hour or so, and you're exhausted, which you didn't realize a minute ago. But when you jit that playback button and watch your creations spring to life it's completely worth it! In fact I'll sometimes sit and watch a clip over and over far too many times after finishing it. 

I don't have any animation done for this project yet. Due to the nature of the film, it's all going to take place in either one long shot ot (more likely, in fact almost certainly)  few shots that have to be shot one after the other in order because I'll have many puppets running around in the one set and there's no way I'd be able to predict beforehand exactly where each puppet will be at the end of a shot (a necessity if you're shooting out of order of course). And since it all takes place in one bar that you can pretty much see in its entirety the whole time I have to finish all the puppets and set dressing and get my lighting tweaked perfectly and try to figure out the very complex staging and blocking for it a little bit in advance before even shooting the first frame. Most of that is done now, but I must admit I'm a little scared to go ahead with it because I really set myself up for a doozy of a film. If you notice, in the past I usually only animated one puppet in a shot. There was a test shot with 2 puppets so I could start to work out how to make them interact with each other... but that's as complex as I've got yet. And for this film I'll jave - let's see 8 (human - er semi-human) puppets plus one very complex creature/thingy plus at one point I was considering a moving camera!! 

So I really have to work up my courage and take a deep breath before I plunge in!! This is gonna be exhilarating/scary-as-hell all at once!! And I fully expect to crew up a few attempts before I get it figured out. Ill probably make a couple of total crap starts and learn some of the many ways to mess something like this up, and then figure out a way to organize it all. And yes, I do know about exposure sheets and storyboards, but I refuse to work that way! Well, unless forced by necessity to do it. See, it would go against my romantic notions of the artist working spur-of-the-moment and seat-of-the-pants in an entirely hand-crafted little world and thus keeping some small spark of old-world craftsmanship and artistry alive in this day and age (nothing against computer animation or any other computer craft - it's a tool after all and can be used to create art just as pleasing as I can cobble together with my hands). 

In fact, next time I pop in here I'll write up a lil supm bout how this project came to be and how it got so blasted complicated!! Stay tuned...

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## Darkmatters

> For some reason, I really want to see you create some stop-motion porn. 
> 
> Don't judge me.



Gavin, I just might have to do it....  ::lol:: 

Just for you.

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## Flying Spaghetti Monster

DARKMATTERS, YOU ARE THE MAN.

Love all of it  ::D:

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## Darkmatters

Haha! Awesome! Thanks!! 

And for the record - I'm a huge Spaghetti fan!!

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## redisreddish



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## JoeyBelgier

That's great  ::D: 
I want a character in there!!  :Pissed:

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## etherealspirit

Just now seeing this, it's great! Keep it up...

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## lidybug

Beautiful and Inspirational!  What a vast imagination for creation!

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## Darkmatters

Big thanks to all of you!

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## Oneironaut Zero

I vote for Passing Strange related stop-motion work.

It had to be said.  :smiley:

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## Darkmatters

I think not - therefore I aint.   ::nono::

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## twistedwhisper

Wow....wow.. this was like mind blowing good. I so want to work on some project with you.

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## Darkmatters

Thank you!

I just realized I have a more recent clip that needs to be added here:




Just testing animated camera movement and focus pulls for my upcoming flick.

** Edit 
Wow - this is what they're calling Centered these days??!! Good grief! 
Anyway, here's also a still image I took some time after that last test:

WindowBokeh 06 - wiiide open ND_ by Darkmatters, on Flickr
This is much more the way the film itself is going to look.

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## sloth

Very impressive, and ... 
...personal.

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## Xanous

I finally got around to checking this thread out. I'm not sure how anyone here calls this creepy. Doesn't lucid dreaming require a certain amount of fearlessness or am I the only one with disturbing dreams? Anyway, I think of Tim Burton when I see your work and I absolutely love it!  ::goodjob::

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## DeletePlease

Where's my clay porn, you old coot?

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## Darkmatters

Oh - here ya go:




Cranked it out today just for you Gavin!

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## WiseEggHead

Pretty awesome stuff you got there! And just because of your reply in that other thread, my curiosity led me here, lol. I would love to follow your development, please do more?

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## Darkmatters

Thank you! Actually there's a lot more stop than motion going on in my basement studio just now, as I'm working on painting instead. Oh, the problems associated with being creative in many fields and not having any more time than any other mortal.. But you might also enjoy my art gallery thread.

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## amateur

I tried to throw money at you like the old days, but it bounced off of my computer screen, and landed in my coffee.

It's the thought that counts. Nice work!

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## Darkmatters

> I tried to throw money at you like the old days, but it bounced off of my computer screen, and landed in my coffee.
> 
> It's the thought that counts. Nice work!





Crap!! Well, then I guess I'll stop putting my tin can here in front of my monitor in case anybody throws any coin my way...  ::chuckle::  (No wonder I have yet to hear that satisfying *TINK-RATTLE*)

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## HeavySleeper

I just recently came across this video giving an analysis on a game called Dream Machine. Apparently the game came out way back in 2010, so it's been around for almost a decade. Just thought I'd drop the video in here since the look of the game really reminded me of your art style, Darkmatters. Not to mention the obvious connection with dreams.

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