Sumo Science

Sumo Science is formed by Will Studd and Ed Patterson, they specialise in advertising for companies using stop-motion, 2D, live action and puppetry animation; The two are represented by Aardman Animation. The group is hired by other companies to create adverts, their most successful of which were comissioned by Nokia. Funded by the mobile phone giant they went on to create two record breaking stop-motion animations, 'Gulp' and 'Dot'.




Dot (shown above) is their most successful animation; Dot holds the Guinness world record for the smallest stop-motion animation ever created and holds countless awards in animation. Funded by Nokia the tiny world of the little girl is recorded using a Nokia N8 combined with a cell scope the video was filmed on a programmable moving table that can move millimetres at a time. Because the girl character was so tiny it had to be printed from a 3D printer that uses resin to print objects; to move the girl around the world without breaking her with their fingers they used a wire which was removed digitally in post-production. Ontop of that they hand-painted each printed model of the girl and arranged them into trays so they were not lost.



In direct contrast 'Gulp' is the world's largest stop-motion animation; the film is again directed by Sumo Science and again funded by Nokia and filmed with Nokia N8s. As opposed to Dot and the small team involved, Gulp required a whole team of animation graduates, assistants, artists and even a single person in charge of the cameras all located in the south of Wales. The cameras themselves were hoisted on a crane above the beach. The team would use rakes to create the shapes of the oceans, fish and birds whilst artists brought in costumes for the fisherman (who was actually a live person who acted like a human puppet) props and even a costume made mine for the fishes belly. Each scene would be raked and then erased for the next shot only for the scene to be re-composed again. In total this took 5 days including during the night for the interior scenes in the fish's belly (that required lights mounted to cranes to control the light); 16 hours of work equated to roughly 20 seconds of screen-time.