A film like FILTH has to be storyboarded (it would be foolish not to) and those storyboards are cut together with the voice performances to create what is known as the animatic, essentially the film in picture form. The animatic determines the length of each individual shot which hopefully prevents you from animating stuff you don’t need. Hey … I may enjoy this process but I’m not crazy enough to animate just for fun. But even with all that preparation, you might be surprised to learn how often I go into a shot with absolutely no plan. I may know that a puppet needs to move from A to B in a given shot but I leave what happens in between A and B to chance. It can be really dangerous with a linear process like stop motion but it leads to so many inspired bits of performance that I’m willing to gamble on my intuition. That and a little luck usually mean I won’t be animating a shot more than once.
a film by ADAM CIOLFI 