Warhammer 40k hobby YouTuber Don from the channel Let’s Make it 40k created a seven minute stop motion animation of a Space Marine action figure painting a Space Marine wargame miniature, to memorialise the late Bryan Ansell, grandfather of Warhammer.
Don (who prefers not to give his surname) creates a variety of crafty Warhammer 40k videos on his YouTube channel, ranging from guides to converting and painting miniatures, to advice on creating your own Warhammer 40k faction T-shirts. He says that “I’ve been trying to add short stop motions to accompany my build videos lately”.
“When I discovered that Bryan Ansell had passed away, I knew a tribute video was in order”, he says. Ansell was the founder of Citadel Miniatures, the second owner of Games Workshop, and the patron of Warhammer fantasy and Warhammer 40k – you can learn more about him in Wargamer’s obituary. Commemorating his influence on the hobby “called for an extra special effort”, Don says.
Don’s initial idea had been to create “a few stop motion scenes” of a Space Marine painting a Space Marine, but this soon “evolved into its own piece that entailed actually puppeteering the figure into really doing the job”.
It was “an enormous task I hadn’t anticipating becoming as hard as it did”, Don says. He adds: “the editing process was even more gruelling, crashing the editing software several times”. Don eventually resorted to editing the project in fragments and patching them together once they were finished. The whole process took about four days to complete.
If you want to try your hand at this sort of stop-motion, Don has some advice: “get some action figures, a camera, and then get to work bringing your idea to life”. Don’t expect it to be easy, though: “you’ll need gumption, patience, and persistence to see it through”.
You can get Warhammer 40k action figures from both Joy Toy and McFarlane, and some fans get very creative with them – check out this excellent Logan Grimnar conversion.