Valentin Felder

I’m doing stop-motion animation for 10 years now. I started doing it as a hobby, figuring things out by myself and slowly learning more about this technique and how to create cinematic scenes with lighting, compositing, and of course camera movements.

By now I’m very confident in what I’m doing and it also turned into a profession I’m now doing as my day job, though most of the time is still spent on my own crowdfunded movie production “An Unwound Clockwork”.

Besides pure frame-by-frame stop-motion animation, I use digital compositing to combine my animations with live-action footage to achieve a unique visual style. I used many varieties of fog and smoke, as well as fire and sparks to enhance my animations. Also, Bluescreens and Greenscreens get used a lot to combine different setpieces and to add matte paintings as backgrounds. But I never use digitally created images like CGI, I only ever use digital compositing to combine footage of real things.

About Noxon Gear: First of all, it’s very helpful to create camera movements and to be able to do the exact same camera motion multiple times, which is especially helpful for larger setups where it’s necessary to do multiple passes. I’m also looking into set automation with Noxon’s 4-axis controller, to directly drive things that move in my sets, as I often have a lot of machines and other mechanical motions incorporated into my scenes. That way I don’t have to do these simple artificial movements by hand for each frame and I can concentrate on the complex motions of my puppets.

Being able to control all the Hardware with the Dragonframe Software is the most useful thing about this system. The system has the best value for money, it’s a great setup for ambitious Semi-Professionals at an affordable price.