Washing Day
An old woman pegs out her washing on a windy hilltop, and one of the sheets turns out to be a small ghost. She is not impressed.
The brief
Four shots, under 20 seconds, in the look of stop-motion: a lit miniature hilltop at dusk, a washing line and two puppets.
The look had to read as handmade: felt, knitted wool and carved wood on a miniature set, moving with the slight stutter of real stop-motion. The risk was an engine smoothing it all into clean CG.
So the puppets were designed on model sheets, every shot was roughed in pencil and built as a set frame, and three engines were tested on the hardest shot before any of the four was animated. The cut holds each picture for two frames, 12 a second, the cadence of real stop-motion.
The puppets
Two puppets on model sheets: the old woman in felt, knitted wool and carved wood beside a ruler for scale, and the ghost, a cotton sheet with two eye holes.
How one shot was made
Shot 2, the gust, from pencil to cut. It is the hardest shot, so it was also the engine test.
Pencil rough
Every shot was roughed in pencil first, to settle the staging. Here the gust lifts the ghost off the line and two pegs fly.
Set frame
The rough became a set frame, with the puppets on a miniature hilltop under a dusk sky.
Engine test
The same frame went to three engines, and all of them held the look.
MiniMax H3 had the richest felt and wool, so it animated all four shots.
The fix
My note on the first rough cut: the sheets on the line and the background changed from shot to shot.
Shots 2 to 4 were rebuilt on the set of shot 1, with one plain sheet and the ghost, and animated again.
In the film
Shot 2 in the cut, between two dissolves.
From pencil to set
Each rough beside its finished set frame. Slide across a frame to compare.
One set, every shot
The first set frames for shots 2 to 4 against the ones remade after the fix. Slide across to see the cottage, the tree and the sea come back.
What it took
- Design
- Two model sheets, one for each puppet.
- Layout
- Four pencil roughs and four set frames, one of each for every shot.
- Engine test
- Three engines on the hardest shot: MiniMax H3, Kling 3.0 and Seedance 2.5.
- Animation
- MiniMax H3 for all four shots, and for three of them again once their sets were rebuilt after the first rough cut.
- The cut
- 18.8 seconds, four shots joined by dissolves. Outside the dissolves and fades, every picture is held for two frames: 12 a second.
Credits
- Made as
- Original short
- Role
- Story, Puppet design, Layouts, Director, Editor
- Year
- 2026
- Length
- 0:19, 16:9
- Tools
- Higgsfield, GPT Image 2.5, MiniMax H3