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There’s something mesmerising about stop-motion animation. It’s the sense that you’re watching real things, actual models that have been lovingly crafted by hand and that exist in the real world, not just on a hard drive somewhere. Fingerprints left in clay are an imprint of humanity, a reminder that a person spent hours bending a maquette into this shape and that, giving it life.
The results can be spectacular, like the 2016 Laika movie Kubo And The Two Strings, which received universal acclaim from critics for its incredible animation, picking up a BAFTA for Best Animated Film along the way. But stop motion has also left an indelible mark on video gaming.
ArrayThere was a surge of interest in using clay models for making videogames in the early 1990s. Goro, a four-armed boss character in 1992’s Mortal Kombat, was created using stop-motion animation, as were the enemy characters in the pioneering 1993 first-person shooter DOOM. At the time, 3D computer modelling was difficult and required costly hardware, so capturing images of a real-life model provided a relatively easy shortcut.
More games followed that featured an even greater reliance on stop motion. 1993’s ClayFighter was a parody of Street Fighter II that used clay models for all of the fighters, and it was successful enough to spawn two sequels. Primal Rage the following year was another claymation fighting game, this time featuring dinosaurs and apes that were reminiscent of Ray Harryhausen’s special effects work on movies like Jason And The Argonauts and Clash Of The Titans. And Claymates, from the same studio as ClayFighter, was a vibrant 1994 platformer that used plasticine models for all of the characters and enemies.
But the real breakthrough came with The Neverhood in 1996, a point and click adventure that marked the first time a videogame was made entirely using stop-motion animation. Previous titles had used clay models for certain characters, while generating levels and backgrounds using a computer. But The Neverhood featured real-life sets sculpted from clay, and everything was created using cameras and painstakingly poised figurines.
The Neverhood was the zenith of 1990s stop-motion videogames, and a remarkable achievement, but it also marked a period of decline. As 3D modelling rapidly improved and became cheaper to use, game designers moved away from using clay models. A 2D platformer sequel to The Neverhood, called Skullmonkeys, came and went in 1998 without much fanfare. Clay animation had been abandoned in favour of polygons. But those quirky clay games left a lasting impression on youngsters who were lucky enough to play them – and now that generation is bringing stop-motion games back.
A trickle of claymation indie games have emerged over the past decade, including the 2013 detective game Dominique Pamplemousse, the survival game Floogen in 2018 and the multiplayer brawler Clodhoppers from April this year. But whereas these have mostly been small-scale indie projects, there are a couple of stop-motion games in development with the potential to rival the sumptuous feature-film-quality animation of Laika’s output.
One is Harold Halibut, a game about an underwater, city-sized spaceship that has been in the works for almost ten years, and that boasts some incredibly intricate sets. (Technically, Harold Halibut doesn’t use stop motion, however: the handmade models are animated using a computer.)
The other is Vokabulantis, from Danish puppet animation studio Wired Fly and indie game developer Kong Orange, with a story co-written by poet and artist Morten Søndergaard. It tells the tale of two children adventuring through the chaotic world of language using some astonishingly beautiful animation, all created from real-life puppets and handcrafted sets. And there’s a direct line between it and those pioneering claymation games of the 1990s.
“After I played The Neverhood as a child, I always dreamt of making a stop motion videogame,” says Johan Oettinger, Animation and Game Director at Wired Fly. “The humour, the whole little world they made – it’s fun that everything is made out of clay.”
Johan has a background in filmmaking, and has directed several stop-motion short films, including 2012’s Seven Minutes In The Warsaw Ghetto, but he says his urge to make a stop-motion videogame has been growing over the years. Then the opportunity came up to collaborate with Kong Orange on Vokabulantis. The aim, he says, is not to repeat what was done with The Neverhood, but to “take it one step further, to make it even more like a stop-motion film and even more tactile.”
Wired Fly and Kong Orange share an office in Aarhus, the second-largest city in Denmark. The animation studio creates puppets that are fully stop-motion animated by hand, one photograph at a time, while the handmade sets and props are captured digitally using a sophisticated 3D scanning technique. All of these digital assets are then manipulated and used in the videogame by the Kong Orange developers.
Vokabulantis
Vokabulantis
There are two scanning rigs in the corner of the studio: in one, objects are placed on a turntable and rotated while a camera moves up and down, snapping pictures at set intervals and from multiple angles. In the other, smaller objects are placed on a control arm, which moves them around continuously while a fixed camera takes photos. In both cases, the resulting pictures are stitched together using software to create a 3D model.
So far, the results have been stunning. A video of an early part of the game released in June shows the stop-motion animated main characters, Karla and Kurt, scaling a crumbling building with an incredible level of detail. And the quality of the animation sets a new bar for stop-motion videogames – thanks in part to the studio’s dynamic lighting set up, which automatically cycles through light being beamed onto the character from a number of different directions each time an animation frame is captured. This means there are multiple versions of every animation in the game, each with the light falling on the model from a different direction.
But getting to this point has been a challenge.
Vokabulantis has been in (and out of) development since 2015. The work has been funded by bodies such as the European Media Fund and the Danish Film Commission, but Johan says applying for and receiving this kind of arts money can take a considerable amount of time – and work on the game has had to pause periodically when funding has dried up. “The money runs out, and constantly you’re trying to gather more money. So on and off, we’ve been working on other projects – films and commercials and running a studio making puppets.” However, a successful Kickstarter campaign in April this year saw the studio raise more than €89,000 from over 2,000 backers to continue development.
“With the great exposure from the successful Kickstarter campaign, it seems like we can hopefully go in full time and finish Vokabulantis,” says Johan – although he estimates it will still take around three to four years to complete.
Nine years is a long time to be working on one videogame. But Johan is quick to point out that any game with sophisticated animation will take a long time, noting that Inside, a beautiful and rapturously received game from Danish indie studio Playdead, took some six years to make.
He argues that stop motion techniques do not have to take longer than traditional game development methods “if we do it very smartly”: for example, in traditional stop motion a lot of work goes into setting up the first frame of a scene, but for Vokabulantis, animators can immediately iterate an animation, because the puppets and lights are always ready on the set.
Johan also says that creating realistic textures and small details is relatively hard to do on a computer but relatively easy to do using stop motion: “A very detailed object – like a tram with all its cushions, and doorknobs, and little nuts and bolts, and metal plates and sheets, and weathering, and a bit of moss here and there – is very quick to make by hand, but it would take forever to make on a computer.”
Still, making a videogame using real things is far from easy. Any wobbles or reflections can ruin an attempt to scan an object. And getting the feel of the characters right is essential to making a game fun to play, which means endlessly tweaking character animations to make them respond snappily to a player’s inputs. Game animation requires a different mindset from creating animations for film, says Johan: “The poses have to be really strong and quite exaggerated so they read really well.”
So why go to all the effort of creating real-life puppets and sets? What’s the appeal?
“I think on a very basic level it is the joy of seeing textures up close,” says Johan. “It’s the joy of when we were kids and we played with our toys – and we were so close and connected to them and their textures. That feeling comes back no matter how old you are, and it comes back when you see something that is real on screen. And to tell a story with that medium – with real things and textures that we know – it becomes so touching.”
The sheer difficulty and timescale involved in making stop-motion videogames means they’re likely to remain a niche concern for dedicated teams with a deep love and affection for the medium. But the uncanny strangeness and difficulty of the medium itself is also the reason it’s so appealing, says Johan.
“A lot of people say, and I think they’re right, that it’s crazy for us to make a game in stop motion. But we wouldn’t have gotten the attention – we wouldn’t have talked to some journalists – if it wasn’t stop motion. And we want to keep on posting stuff on how we’re making it, because everyone loves to see it: the process of stop motion.”
