Arbitrary Stopframe was born out of a nagging feeling, which I started to experience in early 2011, that I had somehow lost touch with animation. I was too busy working on live-action projects, and writing ambitious scripts, and slowly picking away at larger-scale things, and it had been a long time since I made any short, simple (ish) animated clips just for the joy of it.
So I set myself the challenge, at the end of January, to begin producing a clip each week comprising a bare minimum of 15 seconds, preferably 30+, of zero-dialogue, high-definition stopframe animation, to be edited and uploaded to YouTube by the end of Saturday.
I got off to a decent start, but the 'weekly' aspect started going down the pan from Episode 4 onwards. It's hard to make animations when you're away on holiday without your characters or your production equipment - and sometimes I just got writer's block. But by the end of November, I'd notched up 13 episodes: 9 created entirely on my own, 2 co-written with Tim (who also supplied the music for the series), one written solo by Tim, and the series finale contributed by Sam Arthur. I was running out of ideas that could be filmed on my desk at that stage, so I decided to put the show on hold, and to move to a different location (likely the kitchen) if and when I ever resumed production.
That 'if' remained in force for a little over two years, with two episode storylines half-written, before I decided in January 2014 that I was too busy with things like Papercuts and The Murkum Show, and was unlikely to ever finish the kitchen series - it didn't help that those two episodes still hadn't crystallised properly. So I decided to roll the two into one and scrap the rest the proposed series, leaving Episode 14 Project Coffee as a one-off special, sandwiched in between Papercuts Production Block C and the beginning of work on The Murkum Show Series 2. I'm glad I decided not to try and do a whole series in the kitchen, as it turned out to be a very awkward working environment for animation.
Shortly after producing Episode 14, I came up with another idea which would extend the lifetime of the series: an Animated Advent Calendar. What with it being a bit early in the year for that sort of thing, I put the concept on the back burner and got on with some other stuff, but in November - armed with a new camera - I came back to Arbitrary Stopframe and produced 24 new, very short episodes, releasing one each day from the first of December onwards. The new series is broadly similar to the first, except for the episodes being a bit shorter than before and having a new numerical theme, and they featured a specially-commissioned seasonal remix of the original theme tune.
With the Animated Advent Calendar complete, there are no further plans for Arbitrary Stopframe. Don't hold your breath for a Series 3, because I really don't think there's going to be one.
