We have found an excellent blog called http://cclayworld.blogspot.com, here the owners of Plastilina Creativa takes us through the process of making a stop motion commercial. As soon as I saw this I thought could be really helpfully to see the whole creative process in a step by step basis.

Amazing work Plastilina Creativa and thank you for sharing this with the rest of us!

This is one of the most complex commercials that we've done in stop motion due to the new materials that we worked with, the size of the sceneries and the camera movement, for which we designed a new manual system that allows movement frame by frame.

STORY BOARD:

This was the first story elaborated by the agency to show the idea to the client and producers.

ANIMATIC :

It's a sketch of the TV. commercial, including camera movement as planned, as well as the animation movement as close as possible to the final result. A first edition is made to calculate timing.

ART DIRECTOR:

The Art director decides and proposes the style that is going to be applied. In this case the style was based on the Austrian Architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, from whom we can appreciate "la colina", one of his creations. This architect based his work in the recovery of the natural space, so if a house took the space of a natural field, he would place that field on the roof of the house, with its respective bushes in case it had any. After choosing a certain style comes the material proposals and usually a model is built in scale proportion to have a general idea of what the scenery is going to look like.

CHARACTERS:

The design of characters is based on the ones proposed in the story and afterwards made in clay, what lead to flat characters with articulated wire structures and brass covered with pieces of cloth.

ANIMATION TESTING:

Before making the commercial is necessary to test the type of movement that is going to be used, and the advantages and disadvantages of the structures, to avoid mistakes during the shooting. In this case the characters where very light and where inserted in icopor.

SCENARY:

The scenery was based on the construction of a rotating table, with a thick layer of icopor on the top, to make the characters walking process possible (inserted on the icopor) and that was coated with different types of cloth that where later on painted with airbrush. The houses where made in a similar way as the base and the trees with thick cords of different colors. This process lasted one month.

CAMERA TESTING:

There is an equipment known as the motion control that programs the computerized camera movements and its usually used in high budget productions. In our case this equipment was designed for the commercial in accordance to the designated budget, and it required frame by frame testing, based on the movement of the 3 axes, and to make this possible, we had people moving each axe. Here is the plane of the invented motion control built by Enrique Guzman.

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY:

The director of photography is in charge of illuminating all the scenery in accordance to the style that he chose; in this case it was a night atmosphere that had a lot of blue tones. Many different types of lights where engaged, somewhere built with small bulbs for the poles and others more powerful to create the atmosphere. We required 10 lights not counting the poles. Something that is very delicate when it comes to filming is when a light is damaged or when the level of light decreases during the shooting, that means that is necessary to repeat that shot again losing all the animation that has been done up to that point.

The final Retouches are made and animated backgrounds are added and composed, usually the way to do this is by filming with a green or blue background called CROMA that afterwards is removed or replaced with other elements. The last thing is the set up of the sound and voiceover.