Chris Lavis brings a four-day Stop-Motion Puppet Lab to VIEW Conference 2026

VIEW Conference 2026 (Turin, 12-16 October), whose full programme 80.lv reported on 9 September, includes a hands-on Stop-Motion Puppet Lab led by Chris Lavis, the Oscar-winning co-director of The Girl Who Cried Pearls and co-founder of Clyde Henry Productions. The lab runs as four afternoon sessions (13:00-17:00 CET), 16 hours in all, is capped at 15 participants and needs a ticket separate from conference registration. Participants build wire puppet armatures, shoot their own live-action reference footage and then animate against it -- the studio's method of using live-action video animatics as performance reference -- alone or in pairs, finishing short outdoor stop-motion films that are screened and discussed at the end. The organisers pitch it to beginners and professionals alike under the line "Anything can be a stop-motion puppet, even you!", and ask participants to bring a camera if they have one. The same programme lists Aardman's Merlin Crossingham speaking on the challenges of making a stop-motion feature. The durable part -- how Clyde Henry acts out an entire film in live-action video before shooting a frame, and why that matters for puppets whose faces barely move -- is folded into the Wiki at Storyboard and animatic and Fixed-expression puppet faces.