Animator and Art Assistant jobs in Stop Motion depend very much on the level of skill / experience demanded for the position and the size of the studio. For example, in a bigger studio like Aardman, you may start as a Trainee Assistant Animator and be more responsible for helping tidy up puppets than really do any animation. In all studios the level of difficulty of the shot / model making must be matched with the skills of the Animator / Art Assistant. In smaller studios, you have more chance to be involved with different jobs like Animator and Art Assistant in the same project, which is an attractive factor. Bigger studios normally have more specialised roles and hierarchy.

When we had our first studio visit booked by UAL lecturers, I went to Nexus as I wanted to know about their stop motion work. It was surprising that, for cost reasons, they decided to do replacement animation as each small 3D printed character costs about £1 (I guess before filing and painting), cheaper than making puppets with armatures, according to the director involved in it. Nowadays, you can buy a ready-made armature for £150, and of course you can buy parts, and ally wire and balsa wood to make your own armature, and that would make it cheaper than £150. In addition to that, the 3D printed characters come from a 3D animation simulation, where they print one item for each frame. Not sure about their hourly rate for the 3D animators, but for me it seems more expensive and inefficient to animate the same shot twice, once in 3D and then in stop motion just for stop motion’s sake. I would not choose to work that way. I like traditional hand made animation methods, but I’m not in favour of animating the same film twice in 2 different techniques if you’re just using one in the final film. It’s like bad project management practices imported from projects in other areas, and living in a Dilbert comic strip! I guess building puppets with armatures would be cheaper. I understand stop motion is perceived as expensive mainly due to puppet and set building. However, if you think of cost effectiveness you will only animate in 2D drawing in tablets, and that’s why most commercial animation is done that way, especially in feature films. All other animation techniques may just become an esthetical choice if you think just in reducing costs to the maximum, and many artworks wouldn’t even exist if everybody had this mindset.

Director seems to be more a job progression for animators that want to go down that route when the opportunity arises. It’s like the career progression in Y for engineering: either you progress to an advanced technical position, or you become a director / executive. Though both paths would involve some people managing tasks. At first, I didn’t believe people get easily hired as a director when they graduate, even if they studied Directing Animation in NFTS and made films that did exceptionally well in big name festivals around the world. But this changed when we went for the visit in Nexus studios, and we were told that actually happens often. That is different from what I heard from people that are or used to be directors at Aardman. They either started as animators (like Andy Symanowsky) or came from the film industry after working with other studios, like BBC for example (e. g. Mark Hewis). One thing I was particularly concerned is about creative input in the director role. Needless to say, if the story’s not your own story / pitch you won’t have full creative control in it, although you can have some input and have your opinion / suggestions heard, according to Andy. That’s a good point as if you work in somebody else’s story and you want to avoid having shots that you keep thinking you wanted to have it done in a completely different way and you’re not happy about them. Although I like the idea of working as a director in a studio, I guess I could miss being more involved directly in animating, fabricating, etc. In this point being an independent filmmaker could help.