As a director, Peter Sluszka has strong roots in stop motion and over 20 years of perfecting his craft. Not only has his work garnered plenty of accolades - including screenings at Annecy, the Annies, the Clio Awards, and even a Wood Pencil at D&AD - but he continues to push boundaries to the most delightful dimensions in everything he does. It also helps that he’s gleaned a thing or two from his time working alongside the legendary Michel Gondry.
Having directed original content animation, commercial productions, music videos, television series, and feature films, Peter's portfolio is brimming with live-action, CG, and stop-motion feats. He’s manipulated everything from traditional foam latex puppets to meat, origami, snow, yarn, and (literally) tons of clay. Yarn Feeder Tension Ring
Peter> Aside from experimenting with clay and a video camera as a kid, my formative experiences with animation came from attending screenings at animation festivals. I’d scour the Village Voice and go check them out without having a clue as to what would be featured.
I remember seeing Wallace and Gromit for the first time alongside much darker Eastern European films and loving the range of stop-motion as a medium. These experiences inspired me to start playing with a Bolex camera at home while taking continuing education classes in animation.
Peter. The very first, for hire stop-motion project I worked on was a station ID for The Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy). It was my first experience working on an actual set and before I got my bearings in the darkened stage I smacked my head against the steel arm of a large motion-control rig. Despite the prominent welt on my forehead and long hours, I was hooked and that led to jobs animating at MTV, HBO Family Channel, and on music videos for Michel Gondry.
Peter> One of the fun things about directing commercials is that you get to switch up styles to a degree, depending on the project. Overall though, I’m attracted to very tactile animation where the materials and their textures become critical to the style. And in terms of narrative style, I’m definitely attracted to things that are darkly comical.
Peter> It’s gratifying to see more animated content produced for all ages. I love that directors like Guillermo del Toro and Wes Anderson have embraced animation and specifically stop-motion as a way to expand their own visual language.
Occasionally an oddball idea breaks into the mainstream, confounding expectations and redefining what’s permissible- a show like Ren and Stimpy for example was so unique when it came out, and its batshit-craziness created more openness for offbeat humour that could cross over from kid to adult sensibilities.
I’ve tried to create more adult content with my stop-motion short Hardboiled that really leans into genre satire, balancing simple character design with a gritty world inspired by urban crime dramas.
Peter> Character design can make or break a project and I like to work with different designers depending on the script. Considering the dynamic between characters is essential because if you are crafting a believable world, none of the characters exist in a vacuum.
These two characters from the Momentous Moments of Max and Maxine required very few iterations and felt like an authentic pairing, so the primary challenge was to design an older version of Max as a grandfather. As we experimented with aging him, it became apparent that we had to minimise things like hair loss to maintain an instantaneous visual connection. We also considered the young version of the character an 'old soul', dressing him in a wardrobe that could feasibly span decades of style. With any stop-motion design there is the added complexity of translating designs into sculptural puppets. For expressiveness, I wanted to 3d print replacement faces which required an enormous amount of precision so the cosmetic details wouldn’t jitter between increments. One of our riggers designed an ingenious magnetic registration system so that Max’s miniature wire-rimmed glasses would always sit correctly on the face. Although it creates production challenges, I always try to design the best character and then troubleshoot the issues rather than limiting design based on what is convenient to build.
Another noteworthy design challenge came from the FDA, when we were tasked with designing lung characters for an anti-smoking campaign called Little Lungs in a Great Big World where the lead is mangled in grotesquely hilarious ways due to smoking as a teen. Working with FCB Global to target teen boys with bizarro comedy, we needed to balance the outrageous violence of the scripts with cuter, less anatomically correct characters. The campaign grew to include celebrity cameos with custom lung avatars. Eventually, Tony Hawk, Sky Katz, and Terry Crews all joined the titular Little Lungs on his misadventures. (Grafting Terry Crews, complete with pecs and six pack abs, onto a lung was a satisfying and unforgettable design challenge.)
Peter> You need to feel the energy of the animator in the performance, and this is more important than ever in the age of AI. Hopefully the proliferation of obviously generated content creates a counter desire for handcrafted work.
Also getting nuanced vocal performances with the genuine quirks of human syntax with trusted actors is critical. One example- I was recording with the actor George S. Irving, an old Broadway showman who had also done voice acting for Rankin and Bass. He was playing a comical but villainous type and had the line “as with any revolution, of course there are casualties.” It was meant to be a straight read showing the callousness of the character, but George instinctively added a pause and a suppressed squeal of delight. He found another dimension of the character hidden within the scripted lines which then enhanced the resulting animation immensely.
Peter> It’s very hard to narrow this down and the answer could be different on any given day but two projects I loved working on were Max and Maxine and Land Rover Claynation.
Max and Maxine was a very open concept where I got to shape the story across multiple mediums while focusing on a beautiful relationship and how imaginative play between characters forges a life-affirming bond.
Land Rover was an opportunity to go elbow-deep in clay, literally sculpting and morphing the set, props, and characters for every frame of the film. It almost killed me but it was worth it!
Peter> Animators have a habit of observing the world in a different way. You could be at the store, on the subway, anywhere, and find yourself analysing the mechanics of any mundane motion and mentally calculating the timing breakdown in terms of increments.
One of the most interesting types of motion to plot is morphing and finding visual relationships between one form to the next that are both logical and surprising. A good example of this process would be the man turning into the stag from the Land Rover spot. I didn’t want the morph to feel like a straight line between point A and B so the goal was to have the face reorganise itself in a way that implied a more internal process- perhaps a rewiring of the left and right brain before sorting itself out.
Peter> Dragonframe software definitely changed the game for shooting stop-motion. It lets you control your camera through the software, providing a live view and playback so that you can continuously track the progress of your shot. This increases confidence and lets the animator take more creative risks.
Peter> This is a tough question because I could name half a dozen people but I’m going to call out Henry Selick for the production ingenuity he brought to the Nightmare Before Christmas, a film that gets better with age and was made without the advantages of more recent digital tools, like digital cameras or Dragonframe software. The degree of dedication, precision, and artistry that went into that production redefined the scope and scale of what was possible in stop-motion. Huge props to Tim Burton’s creativity as well but Henry directed it and had to carry the weight of that production.
Peter> Guillermo del Toro identified it best when he said “animation is a medium, not a genre!”
Peter> AI is clearly a threat but animation is about having control over every creative aspect of a project and AI hasn’t supplanted that advantage (yet).
As a broader issue, screen addiction has inflicted a societal ADD, diminishing all of our attention spans. Animators of all mediums need time and space to fully engage without a phone pinging inane alerts every five minutes.
Storage Feeder For Circular Knitting Machine Peter> Make sure you love the process - don’t become obsessed with finding your voice or honing your message. Those things will come naturally as long as you engage in a process and medium that you are passionate about.