Everyone has their own way of building a stop-motion puppet. This is the method Nikhil & I follow, and it’s simple, reliable to an extent, and great for student projects. Materials required to make a movable puppet Before starting, make sure all your materials are ready: Wire cutter/pliers Aluminium wire (1 mm or 1.5 mm for the main structure) Aluminium wire (0.3 mm for fingers) Scale to measure Pen Life-size T-pose print of your character Masking tape Thermacol / styrofoam S

"Stop-motion is all about control" once said Kevin Parry. Control over what the camera sees, what it doesn’t, and how consistent that view stays over hours or sometimes days of animation. Before a single frame is animated, the setup does a lot of the invisible work for you. Let’s start with the room. Ideally, your shooting space should be fully covered, with no natural light entering the set. As tempting as daylight can be, it’s unpredictable. Clouds move, the sun shifts, and

If you’ve ever animated stop-motion, you would know how many things you’re thinking about at once while shooting. Timing, spacing, arcs, eye direction, continuity and somewhere in the back of your mind, a quiet worry: Will this puppet actually hold the pose I’m putting it in? That worry can slowly become loud. A lot of time, it’s not the acting that trips us up, it’s the mechanics. You start second-guessing ideas before you even try them. Not because the character wouldn’t do