Stop Motion Production

Stop-motion in New York draws on a deep craft community. It runs back to the legendary Rankin/Bass animation heritage — the team behind Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town and The Year Without a Santa Claus, made out of NYC offices through the 1960s and 1970s. The line carries on through the MTV stop-motion era and into a modern scene anchored by Buck DUMBO, Studio Lemon in Brooklyn, Pez D'Or, Magoo NYC and the Aardman NYC ops desk.

Our crew connects shoots with these pro houses and the puppet and set-fabrication ateliers behind major work. Those shops feed Apple Music spots, Spotify branded campaigns, Adult Swim short-form, MTV interstitials and the streaming originals from Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV+ and Disney+ out of New York creative offices. Puppet builders deliver armature-based characters with metal skeletons, silicone or foam bodies and replacement-face systems. Set builders construct scale settings at SVA's animation programs, Pratt's industrial design workshops and the independent Brooklyn ateliers behind commercial and feature work.

Capture runs on Dragonframe-equipped rigs with Sony A7R V and Canon EOS R5 mirrorless bodies at 4K and above. Each rig pairs steady practical lighting with motorised focus control. We add Mark Roberts motion-control camera moves when a shot needs dollies, pans or crane motion alongside the frame-by-frame animation.

Production planning starts from the slow pace of stop motion. A shooting day often yields just one to five seconds of finished animation, so a thirty-second commercial can span several weeks of capture plus pre-production and post. Our team supports each stage of that arc. We cover storyboarding, character and set design and tech pre-visualisation, then fabrication and animation direction on stage at Steiner Studios in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Silvercup, Kaufman Astoria or pro Brooklyn animation studios. The final pass runs through NYC's Emmy- and Oscar-winning post facilities.

Post covers rig removal, compositing, miniature integration and DI grading. That work runs through Picture Shop, PostWorks NY, Harbor, Nice Shoes and String & Can, with Dolby Atmos mixes open through Sound One and Soundtrack New York for any audio finishing you need. Productions claiming the thirty-per-cent New York State Film Tax Credit plus the ten-per-cent NYC uplift under the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment get full paperwork support. This covers IATSE Local 829 art department, Local 600 camera and Local 700 editor coverage and Teamsters Local 817 transport across the puppet-fabrication, animation and DI crews on the project.