From the first spark of an idea to the final frame, discover how thoughtful pre-production shapes a stop-motion film. Adithi Krishnadas takes us through her process in The Seed, exploring how storyboards, animatics, design, and planning help bring an idea to life.

I'm Zack Buchman, founder and Creative Director of Furry Puppet Studio, a custom puppet studio in SoHo, New York. We design and build custom puppets, mostly for television, advertising, and music videos, and I love to stay close to the process from the first sketch through the shoot.

This is a quick and easy method of how you can create a stop-motion puppet using aluminium wires and foam or thermacol

"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 in stop-motion, you know how many things you’re juggling 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 the 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 something, b