Christmas with Max and Juno! (Stopmotion!)

Over a month late but never mind, here’s what Max, Juno (and Baxter the dog!) got up to at Christmas this year! Guest starring Juno’s parents - Jean and Andrew.

I’m super pleased with most of this animation but honestly, some aspects didn’t work as well as planned and by the end I got very lazy with the editing which is why it isn’t as perfectly synched to the music as I’d intended. I rushed quite a few sequences and it shows, at least to me anyway, but it’s my own fault for leaving it too late to start, and then procrastinating for the best part of a month about posting it!

Follow #maxandjuno on Instagram for more of their shenanigans and check out my blog (http://lastalliancestudios.blogspot.com) for DIYs, photography and more!

Oh my goodness, my jaw is on the floor --- this is incredible!  All the details...the time it  must have taken to set it up and make it! :O

I adore the doggie's antics. And the fact that she gave her a model horse for Christmas , ahhh. :'')

The whole thing is so adorable, and the dinner sequence with the food completely amazed me.

Thank you SO much for sharing!

WOW!!! That was really awesome, Christine. I think I can see a couple spots where it looked like you may have been pressed for time, but overall I thought it was fantastic. I agree with skywalkersaga, I think the dinner sequence was probably my favorite part. The gestures and reactions were really great. And I love the blinking cell-phone bit. And what can you say about Baxter, the little rascal. Always entertaining. Glad to see you've been busy making a new Max & Juno adventure. Was this the first time you included Juno's parents? I don't recall ever seeing them before.

Great job.

Christine that was brilliant i wish i could do something like that with my girls

Positively phenomenal!  


As someone who has dabbled with stop-motion animation (albeit at another scale), I understand precisely what sort of effort and time went into this...  

The results are purely magical.


What wonderfully intricate work.  Spectacular entertainment...  

Thank you, Lynkhart!

Indeed WOW!!! What a amazing video that had to be a ton of work, great job Christine and Thank You for sharing.

That really was incredible! How long did that take you to make? Do you animate as your profession? It was amazing! Merry belated Xmas BTW

Ok... this is sooooooooo amazingly awesome!!!! I couldn't figure the ton of work it was to make such a long movie but wow from A to Z, it's brilliant, the storytelling, the diorama, the details, all the poses and global animation, just extraordinary!!!

Thanks a ton for sharing, and for bringing back Christmas's spirit (it's actually snowing on Paris today, your video is right on time!)

Another beautifully elaborate feat of stopmotion. Great work on the video, the figures, and all the details as always.

Blackpool, it's snowing here as well! Lynkhart, I'm starting to think your video is the cause of this as some sort of late Christmas miracle.

Seriously though, SO beautifully done. You convey so much personality in the way your characters move, and created such a genuinely sweet and warm scene. Even Baxter's movements are so perfectly dog-like. And your sets are always a delight to see. Gorgeous!

Thanks a lot for the input Reverend, "warm" and "genuine" were the words I was missing when commenting on the other max&Juno thread, that's exactly the feeling I have while watching the videos (again and again for the last hour, my coworker spotted me lol)

Absolute Fantastic ! That must take months of work. Wonderful

D’awww, thank you SO much everyone! <333
I posted this on Instagram and didn’t get nearly as much positive feedback so this means such a lot!

Yes, Juno’s parents are new! I actually customised them months ago but never got round to introducing them. (bonus points to anyone who can guess who Andrew’s headsculpt is XD)

All in all the whole thing took a couple of weeks - there was more I wanted to do but was running out of time...then posted it a month late so I really needn’t have worried! I had some tripod issues and actually shot a lot more that I just wasn’t happy with at all so that had to be scrapped and started again - I am the worst combination of perfectionist and procrastinator so you can imagine how well that works for me. XD
Baxter was supposed to get more screen time (including gate crashing Christmas dinner and making off with half a ton of chipolatas) but his wires are getting a bit creaky and I didn’t want to stress them too much. Ideally I want to remake him with a more robust armature but I can’t find a plastic one small enough and all the more traditional metal ball joints for stopmotion are insanely expensive and much too big.

I honestly had waaaay too much fun doing all the food! I love animating multiple characters at once but just don’t ask me to do a walk cycle because I ALWAYS forget which leg went first and it all goes horribly wrong! One of my pet hates in animation is seeing the main characters move but nothing else around them, as though they exist in a vacuum so I always try hard to make everything else around them feel alive.

I don’t do this for a living sadly, I’m just a keen amateur - there was a stopmotion studio in Glasgow a few years ago that my friend worked at, and she said she’d let me know if any positions came up...but then the studio moved to Berlin so that idea kinda died. XD

Flickr is finally cooperating with my phone so here, have some photos!

Christmas with Max and Juno by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr

Christmas with Max and Juno by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr

Christmas with Max and Juno by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr

Christmas with Max and Juno by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr

Christmas with Max and Juno by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr

Christmas with Max and Juno by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr

Christmas with Max and Juno by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr

Christmas with Max and Juno by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr

Not gonna lie, I need this top for myself. XD

Christmas with Max and Juno by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr

Christmas with Max and Juno by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr

Christmas with Max and Juno by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr

I’ve been working on their bedroom diorama for ages and it’s still not finished but I’m really pleased with it so far!

Christmas with Max and Juno by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr

Christmas with Max and Juno by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr

Christmas with Max and Juno by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr

I really need to make an ongoing thread just for their photos as I take an inordinate amount of them! XD

Really great work on the entire diorama. Thanks for sharing the close-ups of all the food and accessories. Really exceptional work. There's a company out there that makes metal (and plastic) armatures for custom doll-makers, and there stuff is pretty reasonable. Let me see if I can find the link, and I'll post it for you.


EDIT: Here you go, Christine. You may have already heard of these guys; they also have an eBay store.

https://morezmore.wordpress.com/

Lynkhart wrote:

LOL.  Cheeky chic...  

Lynkhart wrote: I really need to make an ongoing thread just for their photos as I take an inordinate amount of them! XD

Please, do...


Again, magnificent.  This is all such an elaborate endeavor, Lynkhart, but you succeed in making it seem so simple...  


Your regard for detail and realism in an interactive environment is evident.  You breathe real life into each scene, achieving so much subtlety throughout the entirety of the animation.  

Moreover, the manner in which you convey emotion with the slightness of a gesture is spectacular; capturing the spirits of joy, excitement, gratitude, affection, even empathy, with such precision - despite the absence of changing facial expressions - is truly an astounding accomplishment.  


Regarding other technical aspects - just managing all that activity without interrupting the continuity is a feat, in itself, surely.  Given all the movable parts within each scene, your ability to keep it fluid and clean is perhaps most impressive.  

I didn’t notice any issues with the synchronicity, personally, and your score adds a certain warmth, in its genuine simplicity, to the whole.  Are you also a musician, and was that an original composition?  

Also, the travel scenes were brilliantly shot and well-placed, providing very visceral sentiment to your theme; something like a sweet melancholy, if that can be sensibly interpreted (as perhaps so in a not-atypical artist’s fashion).  And indeed, that dinner table is quite a spread - you must be a foodie as well as an animator; and the complimentary garnishing expertly abound there to declare the grandeur of a holiday cornucopia.

Overall, absolutely fantastic artistry - and ever so satisfying, from start to finish...  


Andrew?  Yes, clearly that's a modified Leonardo Dicaprio Sculpt, right?  No?  Ken, as Aladdin?  LOL.


PS: I should like to think that poor “creaky” Baxter got his fill of chipolatas at some point somewhere off-camera.