We were lucky to catch up with Brooke Wright recently and have shared our conversation below.

Brooke, appreciate you joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

I am a life-long stop motion animation admirer turned animator! I’m still in the midst of learning the craft, but before I got started, it was a foreign and intimidating medium that I assumed could only be undertaken by the professionals. But professional animators don’t start out as professionals! I turned to YouTube and its endless world of knowledge where I’ve learned from creators like Guldies and Kevin Parry, which led me to Kevin’s stop motion course as well. It’s not as intimidating once you see someone demonstrate the basics of timing, spacing, arcs and frame rates with a gummy bear or a ball of clay.

To be completely honest, I feel pretty unqualified to even talk about my experience with stop motion, considering I’m just getting my foot in the door. The first time I attempted to animate was in January 2022, and then it was nearly a full year later in December 2022 when I made my second animation, and from then on it’s been sporadic. My first attempt was seemingly simple: to make one oversized die cube break into four smaller dice by using a replacement animation technique. Guldies had done something similar and I was duplicating the concept to see how it was done. Over the course of a few hours in Stop Motion Studio I shot around 100 pictures of these dice. I never got around to finishing editing the rigs out of each frame (the rigs being clay and my hands), but it’s something I think of every once in a while, so I know I need to come back to it and give my first animation some closure.

Much like photography, there’s a lot of trial and error while learning to see what works and what doesn’t, which is both fun and frustrating at times. I expected it to be a meticulous and time-consuming process, but I was taken aback by truly how slow the creation process is and how *fast* 12 frames per second goes by when replaying the footage on screen. Hours of animating for just a few seconds of video! It felt like a rip-off at first. Part of the learning process has also included my perpetual unlearning of perfectionism, which has been difficult since there are so many intricacies and little details to pay attention to. I know that the mistakes I make as a newbie are important, but man… sometimes it’s hard for me to accept that.

Brooke, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Unconventional visual storytelling has always had a hold on me. My introduction to the world of creativity began with photography in 2011, which led me to getting into surreal photo manipulation. This was my main creative outlet in high school and a few of the images from back then still remain as some of my favorite works. Surrealism allowed me to combine traditional photography with fantastical imagery by using props, practical effects and editing software like Photoshop to make things people wouldn’t see in the real world.

That’s where stop motion comes in. Much like surreal photo manipulation, there is so much freedom to bring imaginative ideas to life, but with movement. I lost touch with surrealism after high school but it was a few years later when I realized movement was the key ingredient missing from my works after watching a holiday themed animation by Andymation (shout out to Andymation). I watched the video and the behind-the-scenes multiple times, I was just so amazed by it. I remember thinking “It would be cool to know someone who does stop motion so maybe I could see the process in person” which evolved into “What if I was the one who did it? I can just do it myself if I wanted to..?” And it was then when I was bitten by the stop motion bug.  

Right now I’m most proud of my stop motion project named “The Perfect Match”, which depicts two wooden matches jumping into a miniature bathtub together and catching fire (paper fire). It’s weird, colorful, somewhat surreal, and it came out better than I imagined. I designed, cut and assembled over 40 flames with colored paper, edited ~350 individual pictures to remove the rigs in Photoshop and fine-tuned them in Lightroom, recorded foley sound effects with my phone, and used Adobe Premiere Pro for the first time to make some final adjustments! Whew. I animated for hours – long enough to listen to the Coraline audio book and endless music – in a small, crowded room used for storage. And I’ll keep doin’ it! Any audio book recommendations?

I think what may set me apart as a new animator is my background in photography. I took photo classes all throughout high school and community college, and I’m currently back in school studying commercial photography. Over the years I’ve photographed a number of genres from weddings to concerts and portraits, and within the past few years I’ve been having a lot of fun with film street photography. When I’m planning and setting up for my animations I utilize my experience for the technical things like the lighting, composition, colors, and camera settings.  

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Feeling satisfied with a project that matches what I envisioned. With my surreal images, I will reshoot and re-edit until I get it right because it feels wrong to settle for results I’m not looking for. With stop motion, since projects are shot frame by frame, it takes some time before you see it coming together so there can be some uncertainty during the creation process, especially without doing a block animation first. It’s really rewarding when I’ve gotten the positioning of an object just right, making the movement between frames seamless. It feels like it clicks into place and like confirmation that I’m headed in the right direction which makes me want to keep going.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I am currently in the middle of pivoting, which has brought on a mix of excitement and uncertainty! From 2016 to 2023 I photographed weddings and outdoor portraits, but it has felt like time for a change. I am still actively pursuing photography as a Graphic Information Technology student at ASU with a focus in commercial photography, now gravitating towards a career in product photography and studio portraiture. I was 18 when I started shooting weddings and at the time it felt like the right way to put my photography skills to use after graduating high school. I got to work with so many amazing couples and work alongside some incredible photographers and expand my skills, but I realized I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I used to. But I don’t think this is the end of wedding photography for me. If I come back to it, I would like to shoot more elopements and smaller weddings.

I think a lot of people around my age, 25, fall victim to the sunk-cost fallacy, which stops us from making career changes because we feel like it’s too late. I was hesitant to step away from weddings since I had already put so much time into it and invested in gear specifically for the events, but I realized that I can step away to reassess and can switch to something else.

I don’t know what my future with stop motion may look like! As of right now I will keep making fun and imaginative videos as my creative outlet, although a goal I’m working toward is to combine the medium with product photography to create animated ads for brands. Although it feels so out of reach right now, to someday get to a point where I could intern or animate at a studio like LAIKA would be an absolute dream.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://brookewright.myportfolio.com/work
• Instagram: brukcreates
• Other: TikTok: brukcreates