ANIMATION
Aardman Academy
In September, I was accepted into Aardman Academy’s In-Studio Stop-Motion Professional course. This is where I learnt from the professional in the industry character animation for 5 weeks.
In that time, I was tested to my professional ability to animated a character in a variety of scenarios, including; Walking up ramps, picking up heavy objects, comedy, lip-syncing audio and finally animating a dance sequence. All of these, were essential to understanding body language and the industry standard to making a character feel alive!
I worked with bunch of amazing people to polishing my skills as an animator and from my showreel, I achieved that and has been one of the best experience I have ever gotten to do in my career so far!
FETCH!
Just a beautiful day, where one man is playing fetch with his not so ordinary pet [______]…
A Short Story Created During Aardman Academy - Stop-Motion 2 Course (2025)
Animated & Directed by Thomas West
Stop-motion Short Films
Puppet | A Stop-Motion Short Film
A Stop-motion animated film about a hand-crafted armature puppet miraculously brought to life by his animator using a bottle of magic glue!
The puppet discovers a passion to play a guitar that is displayed across the room, but with only a short amount of time, he must undertake a journey to achieve his dream.
Animated By:
Thomas West
Date created:
01/02/2022
Production History:
Puppet was a small passion project idea, that was original in the back-burner due to my time at University. However, in my final year, we were tasked to make a final project using any media type and I jumped straight-in to bring this animation to life.
With only a month to create the full production pipeline for this project, I organised multiple story outline that would show the beauty of the puppet’s unique character and the world he was brought into. Each week leading up to the final submission, I executed the story-outline, concept-art, storyboards, blocking, animating, re-shoots and editing.
The biggest challenge was only having under 2 weeks to animate the full short, yet it came out beautifully. Getting to incorporate complex emotions with minimal facial expressions, improvising a green-screen by using just a green folding-mat, I managed to finished it on time and it even got me to complete university with BA honours diploma.
After University:
With some extra time after university, I gave the short film a little more polishing with adding more foley-sounds, and better music, and some credits at the end to give thanks to everyone that supported my work.
I was then eager to get more eyes on this animation, therefore, I reached out to various film festivals and lucky the film got to be featured in at least 4 festivals, which only grew the films popularity. Most notably featured at ‘APEX Film Awards and Film-Bath Festival’.
After some time, I was then able to publish ‘Puppet’ onto my YouTube channel. Even after over 1 year being on my channel, it is still attracting new viewers with currently over 6,000 views!