Abstract:

I have had the privilege of being a founding member of a new comprehensive professional art school in Singapore, The School of Art Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University. I was brought into the Digital Animation department to help develop the animation curriculum, particularly the stop motion courses, and to design and build classroom facilities. The original plan for the stop motion curriculum was to assign various exercises which would reinforce basic animation principals and modeling skills to enhance their 3D work in the future. However, throughout the years, students coming out of these stop motion courses have produced more than just exercises. Many have consistently produced innovative and award winning shorts films.

This paper is a reflection on the increased level of interest in stop motion animated filmmaking, paricularly in Singapore within the last 6 years, as well as around the world. I will speculate as to why I believe there has been this resurgence why and this old method of animation did not disappear with the advances in 3D technologies. I will then introduce a few successful projects from my own stop motion courses which merge various artistic disciplines, including photography, design, writing, theatre, sculpture, and visual communications.

Keywords:

stop motion animation, aesthetics, tactility, sense, intelligence, soul.