Mike Tharme, Continuing the Snowball.

Priour to recieving my armature parts from animation toolkit I started to look into Ray Harryhausen's designs of his own ceratopsian dinosaurs. Studying both his original Triceratops armature from the 1930's and the plans from his One Million Years B.C design. It was quite interesting to compare the two together, seeing how much Ray has learned since his early days of armature engineering to his peak of his career work.  "Evolution of the World" Triceratops armature. I noticed major changes between the two designs, the first one obviously been the number of joints in the puppets. In Evolution the are numerous joints sharing the same ball joint and the use of ribs to keep the core hollow, which also appear to be fixed in position; whilst the One Million Triceratops has lost the ribs and uses a much "sleeker" design, this could display the lessons learned from Ray's earlier attempts or that the particular method of armature building was more cumbers...

I've been studying stop motion armatures now for over 10 years, 3 of those years has been actually fabricating them with Animation Toolkit on Chuck Steel: Night of the Trampires , and at Telegael studios on  Morten and the Spider Queen and Project 390 . What I have learned, both historically and technically would be of great interest to future students in stop-motion. I know what your thinking, you take one look at a ball & socket armature and think "this is way to hard to do, its so complicated", well, I once thought exactly the same when I started my animation path back in 2002. The trick is learning how to use it right, ball & socket armature kits are like a steel equivalent to Lego construction kits, you have many tiny pieces that when assembled create a final item, in this case a armature, so understanding the mechanics of biological joints and translating that movement into a engineering solution. Wire is simply understanding how the wire and which wir...

In recent years I came across two videos on Youtube made by Special Effects artist and stop-motion enthusiast Tom Woodruff Jr. He had special permission to animate the original armatures of Mighty Joe Young and King Kong, both armatures made between the 1930's and 1940's.  Tom is one of the founding members of Studio ADI and a former artist of Stan Winston Studio. You may recognize his name from his creature suit performances from the films Aliens, Aliens Vs. Predator, Pumpkinhead and many other feature projects. It's interesting to see the movements of these armatures without the fur and bodies to conceal the mechanics of each joint and their relationship to the rest of the armature. Considering their age, they still hold up extremely well after nearly 90 years, which is a testament to the original creators of the armatures Marcel Delgado and Willis O'Brien. Understanding how these mechanics translate into the characters performance, especially when comparing to...