Here, James announces he’s looking for “Amanda Münschon” while unapologetically zipping up his trousers. We can start to read James’ mask. I love it when it takes a few shots to fully reveal a sight gag. It makes the audience part of the mystery.

Here’s James on the receiving end of the mask tossed by Sushi. The mask only appears to be hanging in mid air. It’s really just hooked on his lapel, leveraging your brain’s suspension of disbelief. We’ll get a better look at that custom mask in the next few shots.

Meanwhile, James puts the straps over his ears in this shot and then tosses his hat to his right. And once again, he doesn’t really throw the hat. I support the bottom of the hat just offscreen on a stack of blocks.

Always keep a stack of blocks and wedges on your animation set. They’ll come in unbelievably useful in a pinch, when some stunt begs your indulgence and you need some quick off-camera rigging.

This is just a quick reaction shot when Sushi screams at James for not wearing a mask. James is still wobbly from spinning around. And here’s where I make up for the fact that these puppets don’t have posable faces by adjusting his hat to simulate a contraction of his forehead muscles.

Also notice the nice focus blur in the background. That adds a lot of depth to an otherwise flat green screen composition. When doing this between shots that might go medium to close-up, remember to scale your background and change the amount of focus blur. That’ll trick any brain into thinking this was shot in-camera.

Here’s the reaction shot. Our first glimpse of James’ face. You can see how detailed the head sculpt is, and you can almost feel the pain in his eyes as we don’t really know if he blew his fingers off.

James shakes off the pain and slips the pistol back into his jacket pocket, minus the silencer which we hear bouncing off the pavement.

This is our first clue that these puppets have interchangeable body parts. When new, the hands are very difficult to get on and off without destroying the current pose. But over time they loosen up and I get better at applying leverage at key pressure points.

This was also my first mistake, in that James’ finger was never on the gun’s trigger. I realized later that even though the fingers on some of the hands are fused together, they can be sliced apart with an X-ACTO blade. And from there they are flexible enough to grip a whole variety of objects.

Oh well — no one would have notice this unless I had just pointed it out. But part of the motivation behind this blog is to help educate other animators who might be tackling similar projects.

Keep thinking outside that box.

We see the gun go off in James’ trembling hand. The muzzle flash is done with the PROGUN plug-in from PixelFilmStudios.com. I love the contrast of the yellow gunfire against B&W.

At 8 frames, this is probably the shortest shot in the film. That’s 1/3 of a second at 24 FPS (frames per second). But the jolting sound effect really sells the fact that James is at a minimum intoxicated and should probably be reported to HR.

Act 1 opens with James Bondáge stumbling drunk through a Tokyo neighborhood at dusk, desperately looking for a place to pee while trying to screw a silencer onto his pistol. Here we set the tone visually for our character’s Cold War roots by using a Cast filter and a soft-focus background.

This is a 1:6 scale Phicen M31 puppet, approximately 12 inches tall. The costume is specifically for a Secret Agent, and the fit is always too tight. The head sculpt is an older Sean Connery. I found the hat separately, and had to trim its brim with manicure scissors to match Bond’s original Trilby hat.

Phicen puppets, and most of these costumes and props are made in China. The posable figures feature a stainless steel ball-jointed armature with 26 points of articulation. They have a seamless body made from medical-grade silicone. And yes, they’re anatomically correct. They have substantial weight and can reproduce 90% of human movement. Plus plenty of inhuman poses!

I chose to limit any use of rigging, like traditional screw-downs or magnets, preferring instead to achieve each pose by natural balance. I love a good challenge, pushing the limits whenever I can. In the case of POSERS, each puppet requires a different negotiation of trust through trial and error.

These 126 frames of animation were shot on the cyclorama green screen stage I designed and built from scratch. More on that later — it’s pretty cool.

The background is video I shot on my iPhone near the Tokyo Imperial Palace. If you listen closely, you can hear some kind of martial arts class taking place inside that building.

The music here is my own original score, playing homage to older James Bond theme music from the 1960s. Throughout POSERS you’ll see and hear layers upon layers of music, and other mixed media, synced with the animation — often on the beat.

Light… Camera… Action!

Act 2 starts with a carefully crafted title sequence — an homage to 007 in 1967’s You Only Live Twice. The matte graphics in the original were likely hand cut, so I tried to replicate the same shapes with a keyframed shape mask. And that took forever!