Story by Jamie Hershman

Greg Arden pulls out a two-part silicone mold in the shape of a miniature body says. “I have a cabinet of random objects called the ‘holy junk drawer’,” he says. Arden holds up the mold compared to the doll, which fits perfectly into the form. The figure is composed of wire rods and foam, but doesn’t look like the average Barbie doll. It has a more eerie feel, like it’s straight out of The Nightmare Before Christmas with a lanky build and untamed hair. Scrap fabric, yarn, wood and other bits clutter the wood workshop table. “I can’t throw [anything] away because you never know when or where it might work in a miniature set,” Arden says. The art department is a well-stocked craft store with shelves dedicated to paints, cataloged randomly by color, threads set in a caddy like the rainbow.
Coworker and Creative Director Paul Harrod admires Arden’s doll. “Somehow we put our brains together and that’s what we get out of it,” Harrod says. He grins as he looks around the room at the myriad of puppets and scaled-down furniture sets, seemingly amazed at the work that’s produced daily in this animation studio.
Bent Image Lab acts more like a small community rather than a formal work setting. Founded in 2002, this animation studio focuses on special effects-style commercials. They utilize many forms of animation, such as stop-motion, computer-generated imagery, two-dimensional and live-action puppetry to capture a new take on advertising.
Famously known for building miniature claymation sets for their stop-motion animation, Bent Image Lab uses this technique to make small sculpted objects appear as if they are moving on their own. Bent studios call for meticulously sharp and creative team members to execute complex ideas by designing unique content for production. A single project includes creating physical art, directing, and finalizing  digital animation, requiring a team of animators to collaborate to produce a 30-second commercial.
Art is a difficult field to break into, but Harrod made his passion into a career. His interest in animation was sparked at the age of five by the stop motion special effects in the original King Kong movie. He began creating his first sculptures at the age of 12 by making masks out of carved mattress foam and liquid latex, which were inspired by Planet of the Apes characters. “I loved making the stuff,” Harrod says. It impacted him in such a way that he turned sculpting into a career.

Harrod received his Master’s of Fine Arts degree at California Institute of the Arts, where he used his free time to experiment with miniature set constructions and short videos to get hands-on experience. He originally planned to use his education and love of sculpting to make stop motion animations, despite the fact that they were loosing their popularity in the 1980s. Harrod was lucky enough to land a job on the children’s cartoon show Pee-wee’s Playhouse with the help of a friend from art school, which launched his animation career. The show transformed the image of stop-motion in the late 1980s by using innovative strata-cut clay animation techniques, where lumps of clay are sliced into thin sheets. He later moved on to work at Will Vinton Studios that created the Fox TV show The PJs, the first stop-motion primetime TV series in the United States. He started his work at Bent in 2002, a little less than a year after it had been founded.
Creating stop motion animation requires a hands-on education to create these miniature worlds. Arden, who is now an art director and fabricator, began his work at Bent as a carpenter, creating full-size wood sets. He learned all of his artistic skills while working at Bent—he never had a formal college education, so he worked his way up from freelance carpenter to full-time art director.
As a set creator for the Portland rats segment on Portlandia, Arden is known in the office as a garbage artist. He creates unique sets from bits of scraps and things he finds. Using unconventional innovation, he added an upside-down barometer to serve as a grandfather clock in the rats’ apartment, along with dried orange peels to resemble a mid-century lamp. Creativity is certainly not lost in him, as he can make a blue loveseat the size of a computer keyboard out of fiberboard and bed foam cushions.
“Obviously, it’s the art world, so you are always looking for something new and different,” Arden explains, desribing some of the different types of material he used for the show.
It’s not easy to be an artist at Bent. Different companies hire the animators to create sets for them. It’s equal parts art and business, and pleasing the company they are creating animations for is not an easy feat.
“The approval process is always really hard,” Arden explains. “You want an agency to have confidence in what you’re presenting. The biggest job is keeping that trust.”
When all the stop-motion sets are created, it’s the animator’s job to make the piece come to life digitally. Animator Jen Prokopowicz spends her entire day alone with a set of headphones and a desktop computer, making the animations come to life on screen. She started at Bent making tiny puppets as a freelancer, later shifting her work to computer animation.
Her work is meticulous—Prokopowicz edits each small piece of animation 24 times to reach one second of film because there are 24 frames in a second. She usually can produce up to eight seconds of film a day, working for hours in the animation booth.
“It’s like slow-motion acting,” Prokopowicz says of stop motion. She has to understand how to act out the scene from the character’s perspective. “You have to figure out how that robot walks, how that character feels when that other character rejects them, how does that small dog get through a busy street,” she explains. Each clay figure must be moved just a little with each frame to generate the image of fluid and natural movement.
While a lot of the animation she does requires individual work, the entire process of making a commercial requires a team approach. Each member has a specific part of a project for the commercial to be made in the best way possible.
“My favorite part of the job is being able to collaborate,” Prokopwicz says. She talks quietly, using her hands to explain herself. “Everybody has such a wide variety of skill sets that I admire.” She looks around at her colleagues. With a quick glance and a slight head nod, Prokopwicz conveys the respect she has for Harrod and Arden. Her pride for her work shines through with her smile.
 
 

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The Animator’s World