Raucous yet refined rebel, Max Winston has recently developed a stop-mo ‘cartoon’ series for television. It did not go into production, but certainly not for lack of awesomeness. Max gives Dragonframe an exclusive interview on the tantalizing, yet unseen, Pandora’s box of ‘The Woods.’

What kind of armatures did you use?

I used wire armatures for the puppets. I like wire because you can really push the puppets’ limbs and such very far without hitting an “end point”, as you might with ball & socket armatures. The freedom of wire lets me get more cartoony movement, too.

What materials did you use for the forest?

Most of the set materials were bought at the dollar store, then painted and/or glued together to appear not cheap. If you look closely, you can see a Chore-Boy scrubber acting as a bush. This was partly to convince the network I was developing with, that stop motion doesn’t have to be expensive to look fun! The far backgrounds were painted digitally and composited in post.

How did you come up with those great floaty eyebrows? Did you experiment with different approaches or are you just a genius?

Ha! When I make a puppet from a design, I like to sacrifice as little of the original design as possible. I feel that too often, stop motion puppet design is an afterthought; something gets lost in translation between the original design and the process of fabricating the puppet. With every step of making the puppet, I try to preserve not the exact features from the design, but the feeling of those features. My designs for these characters had floaty eyebrows, just because… I drew them that way- ha! When I’m drawing, I don’t restrict my designs to the bounds of reality, I just draw how I want then figure out how that stuff will work when the time comes. If the eyebrows were stuck to the characters’ faces with wax or something, it would have had a much different feel, so… attaching them to pins seemed like the best approach.

Did you pre-plan the lip sync or make it up as you went along?

I did pre-plan the lip-sync, using the dialogue window in Dragonframe. For the mouth shapes, I just referenced basic mouth shapes for animation from Preston Blair’s animation book, then applied those shapes to my designs. I always like to make a few extra “weird” mouths for special situations, like when they’re screaming and such. For this style of puppet, the mouths are so simple that you can sometimes make a special one while shooting, if you get some strange idea on the fly…

What are the character’s names?

Boyo is the boy, and Cuts is the bush.

If it were to go into production, would you give us a potential storyline? …Just to give us a taste of what we’re missing.

The show is about Boyo, who is stuck in the Woods, and Cuts, his talking bush-friend with stick legs. They are stuck between a century-long battle between the different tribes of the Woods: The WOODSIES (All the plants, trees and foliage), The REPS (Foofy Colonial reptilian beings whom live underground in ornate caverns), and the BUGS (They… well, they’re bugs). However, Boyo, being the sole human in the Woods, is the only adversary between these tribes and their common enemy… the evil Woodsman, from my film “I live in the Woods“.

Here’s one of the many story premises we thought up:

Boyo finds a hole. A big bottomless hole, big enough to climb down into. No one has noticed this hole before, it’s just… there. More and more of the residents of the Woods start coming over to check out this amazing hole. It’s remarkable! It’s fascinating! Everyone wants their picture taken with the hole. Everyone wants a “I Saw the Hole” t-shirt. Pretty soon the whole Woods has Hole Fever! But still, no one knows what’s down there. Boyo decides this obsession with the hole has gone far enough. It’s time for someone to go down there and find out the truth about the hole, and that someone is him! Oh, and Cuts (Cuts: “I’m sorry, what?”). Boyo and Cuts go down in the hole and find that it leads to an upside-down version of the Woods where everyone talks, and is, backwards. But what will happen when they run into backwards versions of themselves? And will they ever make it back to the “forwards-land” from which they came?!?!”

-Max Winston

Thanks, Max! Guess we can’t expect all future cult classics to crystallize immediately. We will wait for the styrofoam stars to align. -Dragonframe

There is more development material on the series on Max’s blog.

Credits:

Directed and Animated by:
Max Winston

Directed of Photography:
Helder K Sun

Color Concept and BG Design:
Romney Caswell

Written by:
Doug Langdale
Max Winston

Voices:
Zoë Moss
Jacob Strick

Compositing:
Hlynur Magnusson

Fabrication Assistant:
Brad Schaffer