material
Improvised and substitute materials in stop-motion fabrication
Materials
Definition
The practice of choosing an everyday or industrial material to solve a specific on-set problem — standing in for a substance that is unavailable, too fragile, too costly, or physically wrong for stop motion's frame-by-frame demands — rather than sourcing or engineering a purpose-built one.
Overview
Stop motion asks more of a material than almost any other filmmaking process: whatever stands in front of the camera must survive dozens or hundreds of individual touches without drifting out of registration, read convincingly at miniature scale under a lens that resolves far more texture than the eye does on set, and behave the same way on the four-hundredth frame as on the first. When the textbook-correct material for a job is missing, too fragile, too expensive, or simply wrong for the puppet's scale, animators and model-makers routinely substitute an everyday object or industrial material instead — a practice that runs through the craft's history from kitchen-cupboard improvisation on early shorts to a construction-industry fabric chosen for a modern visual-effects feature.
Aardman's own account of its studio practice, given in the Young V&A's Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends exhibition, catalogues several of these substitutions directly. Clingfilm stood in for water on the earliest Morph shorts; on Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out, individual lentils were pressed into the miniature moon-buggy's bodywork to read as weathered rivets under the camera; and icing sugar was dusted onto Plasticine models to kill the material's natural shine and produce a matte finish that photographs as skin or stone rather than as wet clay.
LAIKA solved a similar problem the opposite way: not with a kitchen substitute but with an industrial one, chosen because its physical properties, not its cost, matched what paper could not do. Building the origami puppets for Kubo and the Two Strings — including the 1.5-inch swordsman Hanzo — the team found that real paper could not survive repeated animation. The solution was Tyvek, a spun-bonded polyethylene material normally used as a construction moisture barrier, which held folded creases through a shot in a way paper could not; because Tyvek does not accept colour like paper, the studio then had to develop its own dyeing process before the puppets could go in front of camera.
ParaNorman shows a related but distinct move: choosing a material because its normally undesirable behaviour is useful for the character. Silicone faces are suited to durable, paintable puppet skin, but for the film's zombie hordes LAIKA could exploit the material's tendency to sag and visibly break down with age and handling to support the decaying look the characters required. Read together, these cases split into two motives worth distinguishing: substitution for economy or availability, and substitution for a specific physical property the standard material lacks. Both are legitimate craft decisions, and both depend on testing the substitute under the camera before committing it to a hero puppet or set piece.
A later LAIKA example shows that substitution can begin with the by-product of a fabrication operation rather than with a material purchased for the prop. In an official Life at LAIKA transcript, former Model Maker and current Safety Specialist Leah Yao describes making miniature pasta for Prue's kitchen in Wildwood by drilling into a yellow plastic trash can. The drilling released the plastic as a spiral, and that incidental geometry visually read as miniature pasta. The important production principle is not the trash can itself: Yao recognized that a waste curl produced by a tool operation already had the scale, curvature and surface needed for the shot. This is a more opportunistic form of material substitution than Tyvek or silicone, but it follows the same rule — choose the material form that behaves and reads correctly at miniature scale, regardless of its original intended use. The source is an untimed first-party LAIKA cross-post transcript; direct YouTube playback, audio and frame inspection remain separate and were not used for this claim.
A third account, from a studio with no institutional connection to Aardman or LAIKA, suggests the practice is craft-wide rather than particular to either studio. On Memoir of a Snail, writer-director Adam Elliot's independent Melbourne production needed a liquid that would sit on a clay puppet's face as a visible tear — catching light, holding its shape between touches and surviving a multi-frame hold without drying out or sliding off — without behaving like real water on camera. Elliot described the solution in press interviews around the film's release as hair gel mixed with a personal lubricant, chosen for viscosity and shine rather than for resembling water. It sits alongside icing sugar, lentils, Tyvek and Yao's plastic spiral as the same underlying move: solve for how the material behaves under the lens and the animator's touch, not for what it is normally sold to do.
A further Wildwood example shows the same move applied to a puppet's musculature rather than its skin. LAIKA's director of rapid prototyping, Brian McLean, described building animatable biceps for three fight-scene characters out of "horse boning," a stiff mesh material normally sold in tubes for hat-making: "When you push it in and out, it expands in the opposite direction" -- giving an animator a hand-actuated flex effect without engineering a bespoke mechanical part. The material was adopted after the studio experimented with voxel-based, 3D-printed muscle forms inside the puppet body and found the hat-making mesh cheaper and faster to produce at the same effect (Animation Scoop, Bill Desowitz, 2026-09-16).
Workflow
- Identify what the shot actually needs from the material — not a name ("paper," "water") but a behaviour: fold-and-hold strength, matte reflectance, controlled long-term decay, or a simple visual read at miniature scale.
- Rule out the textbook material honestly: too fragile across the shot's frame count, wrong scale, unaffordable at the quantity needed, or — as with paper origami under repeated handling — physically unable to survive the production.
- Search adjacent industries, not just craft or hobby suppliers, for a material engineered for the specific property the shot needs — Tyvek's history as a construction moisture barrier is the model case.
- Test the substitute under actual production conditions before committing a hero puppet or set piece to it: paintability (Tyvek does not accept dye the way paper does), durability across the expected touch count, and how it actually reads through the lens versus how it reads to the eye.
- Document the substitution and its limits for the art department, since a workaround discovered on one puppet or shot is exactly the kind of knowledge that otherwise leaves with the crew member who found it.