Stop Motion Geek

There are few things that are quite like heartbreak – heartbreak of the soul-crushing kind: More than any commonly shared languages or cultural beliefs or social practices is something so universally shared and understood as the pain of heartbreak. However, what makes heartbreak so odd, so unique next to other kinds of pain, is its ability to confine its casualty in a feeling – a prison of a kind isolation that is amazingly personal, inexplicable, and easily crippling. There seems, of course, an easy fix – communication, sharing past pain, past heartbreaks. Words, however, so often fail us. And yet, there is a cure, albeit one that gets so often overlooked. It lingers, waiting to be discovered after the rest have failed. The cure is called art, and its remedy for heartbreak can lie in unexpected places – a cluttered attic, a dormant Netflix queue, a musical instrument that has long since been forgotten. Perhaps its healing power comes from its extraordinarily personal quality, which ...

Adam Savage (left) and Ben Barrowman (right) standing in front of one of Aardman's schedule boards. Copyright Tested. In Stop Motion Geek’s third week of featuring the YouTube channel Tested’s excellent behind-the-scenes look at Early Man – the most recent stop motion feature film from Aardman Animations – special effects devotee Adam Savage interviews Early Man first assistant director Ben Barrowman, the mastermind behind Aardman’s “schedule boards” and the coordinator of the entire production schedule for the film. “Schedule boards” is the term that the folks at Aardman Animations use to refer to the rows upon rows of massive cork boards which are used to plot out the schedule across an entire feature-length production and that are positioned on mobile wall-mounts, one next to another, together spanning an entire wall of one of the studio’s buildings. Adam Savage pointing to a schedule board. Copyright tested. The boards are seemingly inauspicious – light gray in ...

Upon moving from Aardman’s plasticine workshop to the heart of their model-making department, all around special effects enthusiast Adam Savage – outfitted in his iconic, plain black t-shirt, beige fedora, and thick-rimmed glasses – is greeted by an in-depth display of half a dozen of the puppets designed, engineered, and built for Nick Park’s Early Man and by Aardman senior model maker and model making worship manager Jimmy Young – donning a plaid, blue-and-white button-up with the sleeves rolled up as well as glasses and a black “DC” baseball hat. Young proceeds to explain to Savage Aardman’s process of puppet building and model making in Tested’s most recent video documenting Savage’s in his tour of Aardman. The display of many of Aardman's Early Man puppets seen in the video. Copyright Tested and Aardman. “Jimmy, when you came to my cave last year you brought some of your amazing handiwork and gave me a little taste of your guys’ wonderful engineering of these puppet...