The Water Babies

The Water Babies was the Christmas show for The Arches, Glasgow in 2007.

I worked closely with the show's designer Natasha Jiggins to make the animations for the show. I was full of enthusiasm for stop-motion animation after spending a week of my summer with the utterly inspiring Forkbeard Fantasy at one of their summer schools. I'll likely say this quite often, but if you work in the arts go to a Forkbeard Summer School. It was one of the most inspiring and enjoyable weeks of my career. In fact I should do a whole blog post about them.

Planning was important, as it usually is, but here we had to make some key decisions before we could really get started. We needed to establish timings as there was to be some onstage interaction with the animations. Some characters would have dialogue with the main character Tom, and at one point a giant hand would try to grab him - only to be bitten.

Natasha drew out multiple copies of the creatures, the water babies and the hand onto black art card. We then cut them out to be photographed against a light background for compositing. We'd decided to go for a chalky feel and quickly realised that if we wanted the water in the background to be animated at its own pace we'd need to composite on the characters.

So with a camera rostrum mounted in a corner of a basement room of The Arches we spent a few days animating each stage of our planned scenes.

The most straightforward were the sea and river animations, being simply crossfades between frames of chalk textures. Faster for the rushing river, and gentler for the deep sea.

(Click thumbnails for movie files)

River. Crossfades between chalk textures.

Sea. Gentler and subtler now.
Swirly. The scooby-doo moment as the action returns to dry land.

Most scenes needed some characters animated. Some involved the same physical cutout moving, some involved multiple cutouts to allow the characters to change size, shape or gesture.

The Seal swims up and has a conversation (voiced live from the stage) with Tom
The Sunfish was fun, as we designed the scene to create a "reveal" of its true shape

Then I began editing and compositing the images in Final Cut Pro, adding characters to the backgrounds and trying out various speeds - Natasha and I decided to add brief crossfades to each frame to stylise the animations, and give them an underwater dreamy feel.

The Hand tries to grab Tom, who bites back!

The most complex shot of all was the "Toe in the Water" shot, which showed Tom's transition from the real world to the underwater world - from real to animation in our show's visual language.

This involved a friend of Natasha's becoming stunt foot, and a lot of planning and drawing round of feet to match the live action move of the foot to the cutout animation. The join was covered with a bit of digital "mist". I'm quite proud that we managed to have the filthy chimney sweep's foot come out of the water a bit cleaner than it went in, though I doubt that showed up on stage.

Toe in the water. A split screen effect.

The final big reveal of hundreds of Water Babies was composited from five sets of cutouts. Natasha made three or four cutouts for each of five different Water Babies, and we animated these and I composited up the loops of each character in Apple's Motion software. Motion allowed for the adding of the gentle random bobbing motion of each character, so they seem to be moving independently as they would underwater. The render for that movie took about 20 hours as I recall...

The Water Babies emerge, loads of 'em.

The sequences were projected during the show onto the back wall of the set, and formed a part of the overall design alongside Natasha's fantastic wearable puppets for various creatures.

I've collaborated with Natasha again since on Wee Stories' "Treasure Island".