A hand-crafted ride into the sunset with SCAD Generate 2019

On Friday, Oct. 11, SCAD hosted its annual Generate competition. This intensive challenge, often hosted by outside companies or studios, sees students across different majors teaming up to create a product based on a special prompt or challenge — within 24 hours . This year, students in the animation program had their work cut out for them. The challenge for 2019 was given by Turner Studios: create a seven to fifteen second bumper for a Spaghetti Western movie marathon hosted by Turner Classic Movies entitled ‘Into the Sunset’. The studio was looking for a textured, hand-crafted feel to reflect both the nature of Spaghetti Westerns as a genre and the aesthetic TCM looks for in their bumpers.

With this in mind our group, led by fourth year animation major Megan Mer Cockcroft and called “Team Totally Awesome Sweet Alabama Liquid Snake,” decided that instead of attempting to impersonate a tactile look and feel, we would make sure that what people could see was, indeed, a tactile object. Since many of us have had experience or an interest in stop motion animation, we made the decision to create a cutout stop motion bumper.

For those unaware, stop motion is a medium of animation that involves the process of moving an actual physical object and taking a picture of each of these movements frame by frame. Once played back at 24 frames per second, the illusion of movement is achieved.

It is a process that, while rarely used nowadays, has had its place in cinema and animation. Films like 1933’s groundbreaking “King Kong” to 2016’s equally ingenious “Kubo and the Two Strings,” have used the medium to great effect. Cutout stop motion, while somewhat easier than stop motion using a standing puppet, still proves to be tedious and time-consuming, but we knew that this was what would help us stand out from the crowd and achieve the best effect.

After the presenters from Turner came in and gave us their prompt, our team went right to work, starting on conceptualizing our idea right away. Our tale would focus on the day in the life of a harrowing desperado, who travels through the desert to be reunited with their love at a far away saloon. To keep from going the cliche route, we decided to give our story a twist where the desperado would be revealed to be a woman and the couple in the story would be lesbian.

Once we settled on this idea, we began fabricating and furthering our conceptual elements, including character design and color choices. Since I had the most experience with stop motion out of the group, I was primarily in charge of directing the animation aspects, so much of my role kicked in further down the line, but I did assist with puppet assembling and fabrication throughout.

Fabrication was easily the most lengthy and challenging aspect of the project. Our puppets were meticulously cut out of blackboard and had to have their joints assembled using special rivets. They then had to be painted and dried before they could be animated. We also decided to hand paint backgrounds on watercolor paper and build a saloon door out of popsicle sticks, as well as craft certain props and elements that would be photographed and composited in later.

Having to overlap between finalizing design and color choices while building made this task even trickier. It’s no surprise that this very physical process alone took us until midnight to complete. Nonetheless, we all pulled off some dazzling-looking characters and backgrounds by the end.

Animation was split up between myself and Megan. Moving the characters was somewhat of a challenge given the size of the rivets which made their joints somewhat stiff. Animating each character separately on a blue or green screen provided its fair share of hiccups as well. After some time of doing this, followed by some final composites and sound editing, the project was complete by 8 a.m. the next morning, two and a half hours before the deadline.

The final product, while needing some tweaking, came out great and we were all incredibly proud. Similarly, the crowd we showed it to in the morning, had plenty of praise for us, especially considering the time put into our tedious process. While we all put in 110%, our fantastic director, Megan Cockcroft, should be given the most praise for finding our talents and pulling it all together.

When asked about the experience, Cockcroft says, “I’d say it was definitely challenging working with so many teammates, figuring out everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. Overall, everyone had a really good attitude and was willing to push through their comfort zone! We were really ambitious and had the energy and gusto to make our idea happen. There are some parts of the process I would adjust now in hindsight, but I’m really happy with the finished project.”

Our bumper, as well as the other amazing student works from this year’s Generate challenge, will be screened in May 2020 for SCAD Atlanta’s animation showcase, Atlantamation.