Made a frame
at a time
Marlowe Fenn
Stop-motion animator
& puppet fabricator
Armatures machined on the bench, skins cast in the back room, and twelve positions a second photographed one at a time. Nothing here was tweened.
One — Twelve a second
Scroll to run the sheet. On twos, each position is photographed and held for two frames — twelve positions a second, twenty-four frames of film. The hang at the top of each arc is not a flourish; it is what happens when a ball spends more frames near its apex than anywhere else.
Exposure sheet — 48 frames, 2 seconds.
Two — Selected work
Four things
worth showing
Tin Ear
A retired piano tuner loses the last frequency he can hear. Two puppets, one room, and a set built at 1:6 so the upright piano could be played with real hammers. 7,920 positions over fourteen months, shot on twos except the tuning sequence, which went to ones so the hammer fall would not strobe.
Nightjar
A bird made of folded tin and brass wire crossing a moor at dusk. Shot in camera against a rolling painted cyclorama rather than composited — the band wanted the seams visible, and I agreed with them. 2,640 positions, six weeks, one broken wing repaired on the eighteenth day.
The Long Room
Sixty-eight seconds of a library assembling itself, for a drama series that needed its opening to feel handmade against an otherwise digital grade. 816 positions. Every book spine was a separate replacement part, which is a sentence that sounds better than the fortnight it describes.
Salt
A commission for a coastal museum: a fisherman's hands mending a net, on a loop, projected at half scale onto the gallery wall. Hands are the hardest thing in this medium and I took it for exactly that reason. 4,680 positions, and the loop point is still the join I am least happy with.
Three — The workshop
Everything is
built here first
A puppet is a machine that has to survive being touched four thousand times without changing shape. Most of the work is engineering, and it happens before a single frame is exposed.
Armatures
Ball-and-socket, machined from brass and stainless on the bench, sized to the character rather than bought in. A joint that creeps under its own weight will waste a whole day's shooting, and you will not notice until the rushes.
Skins
Silicone for anything that has to deform, foam latex where the volume matters more than the surface. Cast in two-part moulds cut on the same bench, so a replacement can be pulled overnight when one tears mid-shoot.
Replacement mouths
Printed in sets and numbered against the track, because a mouth animated on an armature reads as rubber and a mouth swapped as a part reads as speech. Between twenty and forty shapes for a speaking character.
The shoot
Stills camera, frame capture software, and a rig that can be locked and returned to. Nothing is shot that cannot be shot again the same way six weeks later, because it usually has to be.
Brass rodK&S tubeStainless ball stock Platinum siliconeFoam latexEpoxy putty Aluminium wireRare-earth magnetsTie-downs
Four — About
Slowly, on purpose
I trained as a model maker and came to animation sideways, through a job building miniatures for other people to shoot. The first time I was left alone with a camera and a puppet I did not go home, and that has been the arrangement ever since.
The workshop is two rooms off a yard in Bristol, which is where you end up if you do this for a living in Britain. One room is a bench and a lathe; the other is a stage that has been blacked out so thoroughly that I have walked into the wall in it. I work alone on the fabrication and bring in a second animator for anything longer than about eight minutes.
People ask how long a minute takes. Shot on twos, a minute is seven hundred and twenty separate positions, and a good day is between ninety and a hundred and fifty of them. So: a week, if nothing goes wrong, and something always goes wrong. That arithmetic is the reason the medium looks the way it does, and it is also most of the reason I like it.
I do not composite motion blur back in. The strobe you can see on a fast pan is the honest signature of a thing that was photographed rather than calculated, and removing it removes the only evidence that anybody was there.
Five — Commissions
Tell me about
the piece
- Booking from
- March 2027
- Takes on
- Short film, music video, titles, exhibition
- Does not take
- Anything needing more than 90 sec in under a month
- Crew
- Solo for fabrication, plus one animator over 8 min
- Based
- Bristol, UK — will travel for the shoot
- Rates
- Per project, quoted against a shooting schedule
The honest constraint is the schedule, not the budget. If a deadline needs more positions than there are days, no fee fixes it, and I would rather say so in the first email than in the fourth week.