PORTLAND, OR — Bent Image Lab (www.bentimagelab.com) recently produced and posted the stop-motion holiday special, Jingle All The Way for the Hallmark Channel. The half-hour television program centers around a young boy and a puppy who meet by chance and then are separated, ultimately to once again be reunited thanks to some help from Santa Claus.
Bent created 27 sets for use in the project, which began production back in May. A total of 17 animators contributed to the animated special, creating roughly 18 seconds of stop motion animation per day.
Jingle All The Way features 45 different puppets. The principal characters, including Andrew the little boy, and Jingle the puppy, were made from ball and socket joint armatures covered with silicon skin and foam bodies. The remaining puppets were made out of wire armatures and foam skin. Their clothing is comprised of nylon, wool and cotton, and their hair ranges from yarn and mo hair to embroidery thread. Jingle’s fur is from other stuffed animals and faux fur. Sweaters were cut up to create tree bark texture, and over
500 pounds of powdered sugar was used as snow.
The studio used Canon 60D and Canon 50D digital still cameras to shoot the animation. The special was edited in Final Cut Pro, which was also used for the titles. In total, the special is 22-minutes in length.