We recreated the Silencio Bruno Scene with Stop Motion Animation using the Mattel Luca Scooter Build & Crash set. In our Luca Stop Motion, we had to animate humans. There’s a lot of things you have to think about when animating humans. You have to think about weight and momentum. We wanted to make the toys feel alive and expressive. We wanted them to be able to walk, jump, and even fly through the clouds.

When we watched Luca, we knew we wanted to recreate the Silencio Bruno scene. We had to wait for the Mattel Luca Scooter Build & Crash set. There are three different scooters you can build with the playset. This playset comes with a mixandmatch scooter along with Luca and Alberto, which would be perfect.

These figures don’t stand on their own so a rig needed to be attached to the figures at all times to keep the figures upright. This here is a stop motion winder, which is a great tool that moves horizontally and vertically. It’s kind of like the strings on a marionette.

Unlike traditional 3D animation, Stop Motion rigs add a ton of postprocessing work, because they have to be removed on each frame. It’s tedious work and almost as timeconsuming as the stop motion itself. It’s probably our least favorite part about creating stop motion videos but it’s absolutely necessary.

We knew we had to absolutely have the colander in the animation, so we decided to design our own colander. After designing it, we used a 3D printer to print it out using shiny silver filament. To attach the colander to Luca’s head we used putty.

Animation work began on this project back in late June by a team of two people.

The entire animation was shot on a green screen and careful attention was paid to matching the lighting in the film. Controlling the lighting was very important and helped make the toys fit in with the backgrounds.

There were a total of 22 different shots, which meant we would have to use 22 different camera angles for each shot. There were more scenes planned but due to time we had to cut them.
One of the most difficult aspects was setting up each shot. We would spend hours just trying to position the camera, lights, toys, and rigs to match the film as closely as possible.

The most difficult shots were the shots that had to take place completely in the air because in real life you have gravity. You have to find a way to make sure the toys will not move between each frame.

Because all the backgrounds were running at 24 frames a second, we decided to use a 24frame timeline. This allowed us to shoot on a variety of framerates depending on the animation. To make the toys more expressive we tried to move them slightly on every frame to keep them alive whenever possible. Sometimes we would just tap them or their body parts with a stick.