Behind the Scenes - Holiday Claymation with FancyPantsBionicle!

Hey everyone,

Hope you enjoyed today's holiday special on the channel. If you haven't gotten a chance to watch, please check it out, it's a hoot and a half.

We did a Q&A you can read below with Nick, aka FancyPantsBionicle everywhere online. Nick has done a lot of the stop motion animated ads you might have seen on the channel, and he took on the beastly task of animating this entire six minute project. We think he did great! Hear more about his process below!

Tell us about your experience learning and growing as a stop motion animator. 

NICK: I've been making stop motion shorts for just under 12 years now and I got into it on a whim during highschool. I was just starting to come up with ideas for my YouTube channel, and had always loved stop motion movies like the Rankin Bass Christmas specials and Wallace and Gromit, so it seemed like a fun thing to try. Back then, all I had were some Bionicles, a flip camera, and a dream, but it was all I needed! I fell in love with animating immediately, and dove into learning from as many stop motion tutorials as I could. I made dozens of short videos, and slowly started to get better over time. After discovering my love for animation, I pursued it further and went to school for animation and visual effects at Point Park University. There I learned everything from the 12 principles of animation to the more nitty gritty aspects of various animation software, and got to try my hand at a variety of styles of animation (traditional, motion graphics, 3d, visual effects, and of course several styles of stop motion). I was very lucky to have a bunch of awesome professors who constantly pushed me to be the best animator I could be, and was especially lucky that one of them also specialized in stop motion, so it was a time of rapid growth. It was there that I also learned how to create stop motion puppets! I started out by learning how to make basic wire armature puppets, with my first ones all being very Cranbersher influenced (they all had felt skin and yarn hair). But eventually I became confident enough to try my hand at using some ball and socket armature kits (which are my go to now). The first project I used them for was my senior thesis film, Illuminated Abi, and the character designs in that film heavily influenced how I make puppets today. That film was the first time I had really tried my hand at sculpting faces and it was weirdly super intimidating for me at first. But once I just sat down and did it, it opened up a ton of new creative avenues. 

NICK: From graduation till today, I see every new film as an opportunity to improve. I often try to find something I wasn't satisfied with in a previous animation, and improve them in the next film. I also love to challenge myself to try something new with each animation. It's super easy for me to stay in my comfort zone, so shaking things up with each film keeps me on my toes. One animation, I may try to focus on getting really smooth and delicate character acting, the next I may try to challenge myself to create some more feral and dynamic character acting. I might challenge myself to use a different material for a character's hair, or might try a style of animation I'm not confident in (like animating with sand, or pixilation), or might try some new way of sewing clothes. Regardless, there's always some way to improve and learn!

What's been your favorite Game Grumps ad you've created? What went into that project?

NICK: Ooooo that's a hard one, but I think my favorite was the courtroom ad! Up until the Holiday special, I think this one had my best character animation and my best set/costume design. The courtroom was a lot of fun to design especially. I had to look up a bunch of different real life courtrooms for reference, and had a blast carving and painting everything! I think I made it right after the fourth of July too, so I was able to get a ton of tiny American flags very easily for it. It was a challenge animating Arin while also animating the jury/crowd behind him, but that made for some really fun background gags (like Sahasrahla booking it after Arin brandishes his blade). Also I feel like this one was the most cinematic and told the most fun story of all the ads I've done so far. It's not everyday you get to animate a guy bribing his way out of life in prison with some good merch! I could also tell Arin and Dan were having a lot of fun coming up with the dialogue and merch to namedrop. That always makes for an especially fun cartoon!

Tell us about the holiday special. What are some of the challenges in going for a longer form project like this?

NICK: The Christmas special was such a treat to animate! It was one of the most challenging projects I've worked on so far, but was a blast from start to finish.This project had a lot of firsts: It was my first time animating glass shattering, my first time building more than four sets for a project, first time animating two terrorists being hauled in a little red truck, and weirdly the first time I animated characters without shoes. I had a lot of fun putting little callbacks to other animations and game grumps projects in the background, and making some subtle references to other anime and movies I like. The scene that had me the most worried was the vent scene. I wasn't sure how I'd be able to get the vent to look convincing and was concerned that it'd be too narrow to animate easily in, but once I had the set designed and finished, I had a ton of fun with it. 

NICK: Longer form projects like this are always a lot of fun to do, but the hardest part for me is I always underestimate how much extra work goes into them. Like I said before, I think this short holds the record for the most sets I've designed for a single animation, which while fun, was one of the more time consuming aspects for me. Properly accounting for the time needed to animate, construct sets/puppets, and balance a full time job is something I know I need to get better at. Also the longer the project, the more likely it is for something catastrophic to happen. A character or set might break (usually an easy fix but always annoying), Dragonframe or Adobe might decide to crash, a scene might be more complex than expected, or Apple might decide to update your computer and mess things up. But a fun challenge with this one was cutting down the audio to the six minutes it is now! There were a ton of good bits that I wasn't able to keep in unfortunately due to time, but it was really fun trying to figure out what bits all told the best story while keeping as many of the best gags as possible! 

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We hope you enjoyed this inside look into the animation process. Thanks for supporting us and happy holidays!