The University Daily Kansan Thursday, September 28, 2000
Movies
Section B • Page 5
Stop-motion film breaks new ground
By Lindsey Kiliany Special to the Kansan
Two University of Kansas students are breaking new ground in stop-motion animation.
Nicholas Kral, Minneapolis senior, and Marshall Miller, 1999 alumnus, are creating a stopmotion animation film, The Emperor's New Clothes, based on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale.
A $1,100 undergraduate research award allowed Kral and Miller, with the help of other students and faculty, to create new software that eased the production animation similar to that done for the movie Chicken Run and the television version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Kral said the 10-minute animated short combined metal skeletons, movable body parts, hands-on work and a lot of time. He said that stop-motion animation traditionally was created frame-by-frame, with 15 minutes to an hour of work between each frame being shot. He estimated that an average 90-minute movie with 24 frames per second would have about 130,000 frames.
To cut down on time, Kral, a computer science and theater and film major, created computer software in which images taken with a digital camera could be viewed, stored and manipulated on a computer almost immediately.
The "Animation" and "Integrator" software also enables Kral to add lip-synching and eye movement after the production. In Chicken Run, the chickens' lips had to be moved manually for every shot.
Kral said he was not trying to
revolutionize stop-motion animation, he just wanted to save time.
"In the past, five minutes of animation took about three years for students to produce," he said. "It's very ambitious for students to tackle stop-animation. Chicken Run had 30 animators — we had two."
Production of the 10-minute animated video began last December and should be completed in a couple months, Kral said. He is working on the computer doing post-production work.
Miller was head animator and set designer for the film. He said he created most of the large, medieval set using cardboard boxes. His mother painted the entire set, down to the bricks of the castle, he said.
"They managed to pull all of this advanced technology in the service of art," Jacobson said. "This is the type of research and forward thinking that KU needs to emphasize and reward."
Matt Jacobson, project adviser and assistant professor of theater and film, said the film and its combination of art and technology truly was ground breaking.
"The best place for the software is the universities," he said. "It gives students the chance to shoot."
Scenes from The Emperors New Clothes can be viewed online at http://users.eecs.ukans.edu/~nkral.
Kral and Miller said they hoped they have sparked a creative fire under other film students. Kral said he would leave his software at the University for other filmmakers.
— Edited by Clay McCuistion
Above: This is a scene from the 10-minute, stop-motion animation film, The Emperor's New Clothes, based on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. Production of the film began last December and should be completed in a couple of months.
Left: Marshall Miller, left, KU graduate, and Nicholas Karl, Milennium senior, stand next to the set for The Emperor's New Clothes. The set, which depicts medieval buildings, was made mostly by painting large cardboard boxes. Portrait by Christina Neff/KANSAN
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