Stop Motion Production

Here is how the work lines up. Stop-motion in New York draws on a craft community that runs from 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 — 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.

Here is how the picture comes together. Our crew connects shoots with these pro houses alongside the puppet and set-fabrication ateliers feeding Apple Music spots, Spotify branded campaigns, Adult Swim short-form, MTV interstitials and the streaming originals commissioned by 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, while set builders construct scale settings at SVA's animation programs, Pratt's industrial design workshops and the independent Brooklyn ateliers feeding commercial and feature work.

Here is what we have to work with. Capture happens on Dragonframe-equipped rigs running Sony A7R V and Canon EOS R5 mirrorless bodies at 4K and above, with steady practical lighting, motorised focus control and Mark Roberts motion-control camera moves when sequences call for dollies, pans or crane motion alongside the frame-by-frame animation.

Here is the layout. Production planning recognises the time profile of stop motion — often one to five seconds of finished animation per shooting day, with a thirty-second commercial often spanning several weeks of capture plus pre-production and post. Our team supports each stage: storyboarding, character and set design and tech pre-visualisation through to fabrication, animation direction on stage at Steiner Studios in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Silvercup, Kaufman Astoria or pro Brooklyn animation studios, and the final pass through NYC's Emmy- and Oscar-winning post facilities.

Here is how the work shapes up. Post — rig removal, compositing, miniature integration and DI grading — 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 needed. 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 receive full forms support. This includes 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 working on the project.