The Making Of A Life in Print: 4. Animation

A+C (aplusc.tv) animation studio website: aplusc.tv
A+C animator James Harvey and Creative Director Dan Richards talk about the process of animating A Life in Print.
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A+C Studios is an animation production studio, specialising in traditional lens based animation. However, there is nothing traditional about our work! We love to combine hand crafted and original stop motion techniques with new and experimental ideas and design. With our dedicated in-house stop motion studio and creative team, we can efficiently execute projects from initial brief to final production.
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Script:
Dan: For "A Life in Print" we had to create a whole environment, a whole community over 70 years. That's quite challenging to do in live action so animation, particularly stop motion lends itself really well for this. The animator for our scene, James, had a real task on his hands with lots of characters so we wanted an animator that was really going to add character and bring performance level that was going to be believable for the audience.
James: Some of the animation on this project was some of the most challenging I've faced, in terms of the amount of characters I had to move and the complexity of the animation. The nativity scene saw seven children on-screen and a large cast of audience members all of which had to be moved tiny amounts to bring them to life. For a typical animation routine on the shot like the nativity, involved me first looking at the previous photo to see where I got up to then referring to something called a dope sheet, which was my visual map of the scene so I could see each character's individual movement.
Dan: The wonderful thing about A Life in Print is you can watch it five or six times and still see something you didn't see before.