Long time user of Stop Motion Pro, Ken Priebe, talks about VanArts, his new book and the art of stop motion animation.
Hi Ken, please tell us about yourself, how did you get into animation?
I grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan (a suburb of Detroit) and began studying animation at University of Michigan. During my last couple of years there, I made several stop-motion student films and worked as a traditional 2D animator. In 1998 I moved to Vancouver, Canada to continue my animation studies at Vancouver Institute of Media Arts (VanArts). I started working on a project using Stop Motion Pro, and then someone suggested I should offer a workshop to the other animation students who wanted to try stop-motion. These first few workshops grew into a 12-week part-time course I would teach on weekends to anyone who wanted to learn the technique. After several years of teaching this course at VanArts, an editor at Thomson Course Technology found me through a Google search for stop-motion instructors, and asked me if I'd be interested in writing a book. 6 months of late nights and coffee pots later, my book entitled 'The Art of Stop-Motion Animation ' was released in 2006 and has since sold thousands of copies to aspiring stop-motion animators worldwide. I've also developed two stop-motion courses for the Academy of Art University Cybercampus, and teach them online. It's been great learning more about stop-motion through guiding other artists through the process and helping them learn the craft.
I've also worked on some hand-drawn 2D animation for BigFott Studios (on short films directed by my friend Galen Fott). You have been working at VanArts for sometime now, what do you like about the course and environment there?
During the week, I've been working for VanArts full-time as the director of Admissions, and teaching courses in both stop-motion and hand-drawn animation on a part-time basis. The school has definitely grown over the years. In the beginning, it was just a small animation school that focused exclusively on traditional and CG animation. Since then, there have been additional programs in Entertainment Art, Visual Effects, Digital Photography and Acting which are now being offered alongside Character Animation. These different art forms feed off each other, so it's been neat watching the school grow into a more comprehensive institute for media arts in general. The local industry and community for animation, games, effects and the arts has also grown in Vancouver along with the school. Stop-motion animation has always been a part of this, and my course at VanArts is still the only one of its kind here that provides a formal introduction to the medium.
Can you tell us about the animation course at VanArts? What do the students do there?
The course outline I've developed has changed and grown over time, but some things have also remained pretty consistent over 10 years of teaching it. I've always included an opening lecture on the history of stop-motion animation, showing rarely-seen films by Ladislas Starewitch, George Pal, Will Vinton and other masters of the medium. I think it's important for the students to learn this, and it gives them ideas for different designs or techniques they may want to try. The course then starts with the basic fundamentals, animating simple bouncing balls in clay, and doing clay morphs to learn about timing and exposure sheets. We also cover wire armatures, latex build-up techniques, facial expressions and dialogue. The final project is typically a group dialogue exercise based loosely on the premise of Aardman's 'Creature Comforts'. The students are asked random questions, and whatever un-scripted answers they give, that's what they animate. Voice tracks are usually drawn from a hat so nobody animates their own voice, and they build a puppet to match the dialogue. The results are often hilarious and fun to watch. As an instructor, I dash back and forth between as many as 5 to 10 students at a time, offering suggestions and feedback along the way. I use the same assignments in my online course for Academy of Art, which goes into even more detail, since the students are working on them at home all through the week and upload them for critique.
What hardware do you use? How you use SMP in the program - how does it help you teach animation?
We have two PC computer stations, each with a wooden tabletop and a sheet of plexiglass that can be used for flying effects. When students are shooting, we hook up a mini-DV camcorder with FireWire connection and some basic lighting. Students either do their own solo projects on set, or sometimes they will double up and animate together, for a two-person dialogue for example. While students are shooting on set,
the others are building their puppets and planning their animation.
Stop Motion Pro allows us to play back the students' work immediately, sync it with their dialogue tracks, edit out problem frames and register their movements with the toggle or onion skin tools. Since each class is only three hours long, we have to move quickly and be able to churn out the animation efficiently, so shooting digitally with Stop Motion Pro is great for this. We've also done green-screen effects a few times.
What is next for you and your animation?
I'm still teaching my stop-motion course on-site at VanArts and also for the Academy of Art University online. I still have ideas for my own animated projects, and since I have two young children of my own now, would like to get them involved someday in making short films together.
Offering animation workshops for kids is also something I've started doing, and two years ago I started an annual animation festival at my church as an outreach, where local kids and their families can try stop-motion and other techniques themselves. In addition to all of his, I've started writing another book, tentatively titled 'The Advanced Art of Stop-Motion Animation'. This is a second volume to my first book, and will go into more up-to-date detail on puppets, cameras, compositing, stop-motion history, the online community and animated performance. The book is scheduled for release in Summer 2010, so once again for me there are lots of late nights, coffee, and good ol' fashioned stop-motion animation!
Long time user of Stop Motion Pro, Ken Priebe, talks about VanArts, his 
We also cover wire armatures, latex build-up techniques, facial expressions and dialogue. The final project is typically a group dialogue exercise based loosely on the premise of Aardman's 'Creature Comforts'. The students are asked random questions, and whatever un-scripted answers they give, that's what they animate. Voice tracks are usually drawn from a hat so nobody animates their own voice, and they build a puppet to match the dialogue. The results are often hilarious and fun to watch. As an instructor, I dash back and forth between as many as 5 to 10 students at a time, offering suggestions and feedback along the way. I use the same assignments in my online course for Academy of Art, which goes into even more detail, since the students are working on them at home all through the week and upload them for critique.
