material
Materials
Definition
The physical substances a stop-motion production builds with -- armature metal, skin silicone or foam latex, hair and fur, wood, oil-based clay, and manufactured plastic parts such as LEGO's ABS -- each chosen for a different trade-off between how it holds a pose, how it reads as flesh or surface on camera, and how it survives repeated handling across a shoot.
Overview
Most contemporary stop-motion puppets are not one material decision but several, layered in a fixed order: an internal armature to hold the pose, a padding or core material to establish silhouette and softness, an outer skin for the surface the camera actually sees, and -- where the character calls for it -- hair, fur or feathers applied on top of that skin. Each layer solves a problem the others cannot: an armature that also had to look like flesh would be unworkable to pose, and a skin soft enough to look alive would collapse without a rigid structure underneath it.
The armature is usually one of two families -- twisted wire, which is inexpensive and fast to build but wears out under repeated posing, or a ball-and-socket metal skeleton, which costs more and takes longer to fabricate but holds a repeatable range of motion over an entire production (see Armature). The skin layer is rarely a single substance either: productions commonly pair a cast-resin or foam-latex core with a silicone outer skin, because no one material is simultaneously cheap, durable across a long shoot, and capable of the fine surface detail a close-up demands (see Skin materials). Hair, fur and feathers are their own layer again -- individually attached fine elements that move and catch light the way real hair does, at the cost of adding weight and bulk the armature underneath has to still be able to carry (see Hair materials).
Two production choices invert this layered-and-hidden model entirely. A wood puppet, such as the title character of Hidari, leaves the material and its joinery exposed as the design itself rather than hiding a mechanism under a soft skin (see Wood as a puppet material). Clay animation goes further still: the visible surface of a claymation figure is commonly one continuous oil-based compound, reshaped by hand between exposures rather than assembled from separate structural and cosmetic layers, even when an armature sits inside it (see Clay).
Brickfilm sits outside this whole spectrum, because its material is manufactured rather than sculpted or cast for the production: a brick or minifigure part is bought off the shelf, not built. LEGO's own account of its 1963 switch from cellulose acetate to ABS credits the new plastic with being more stable, more impact-resistant, more colourfast, and mouldable to a far finer tolerance than what it replaced -- the same dimensional precision that lets millions of separately manufactured parts click together identically today, which is what makes a brick puppet's material problem a sourcing and engineering one rather than a fabrication one (see ABS as a brickfilm material).
Workflow
- Build the internal armature -- wire or ball-and-socket -- sized to the puppet's scale and the range of pose the shot list demands.
- Pad or core the body, typically in cast resin or foam latex, to establish silhouette and give the skin layer something soft to sit on.
- Dress the core in an outer skin material, commonly silicone, for a paintable, screen-ready surface.
- Apply hair, fur or feather elements individually wherever the character's surface needs to catch light and move like the real material.
- Paint, finish and costume the completed puppet.