This side up

Recipe

1. Pose Boone on a box in front of the TV and take one photograph per shot.
2. Crop the photo on a grid labelled in source pixels, and trace each part's outline from it.
3. Parts claim pixels in order: the forearm first, then the upper arm, then the head. Whatever is left is the body. Pivots go on the visible joint connectors.
4. Take Boone out of the photo and rebuild the background behind him. That is the plate.
5. Key each part's rotation in degrees (positive is clockwise), hold poses on twos like stop-motion, and keep the camera move smooth. Add snow, wind, drips or spray where the shot needs it.
6. Cut the shots together with cards and short dissolves, an automated foley and music track, and end credits for the crew.

The sheets

What to look for

• The rebuilt plate is rough where Boone stood (layer 4). It shows only where a part rotates away from where it was photographed, so it doesn't have to be perfect.
• A spec is plain data: the source photo, the outlines, the pivots, the keyframes, the camera window. A new shot is a new file, not new code.

What it teaches

• A rig made of the photograph keeps the object's real material. Nothing has to be redrawn to look like cardboard.
• Tracing on a labelled grid makes every cut repeatable and checkable.

Recipe

1. Play the calibration reel on the TV and photograph each section with Boone out of frame: black levels, white, 18% grey, a grey wedge, a colour chart, bars, a checkerboard, a dot grid, registration marks, focus stars, a frame-step check, a parallax drift, green, blue.
2. At the end the reel asks for section 10 again, with Boone in place. That photo ties the puppet to the measured set.
3. Watch the pose guide on a second screen beside the set, not on the TV. Each card shows the target pose. The first version tinted the change red and listed the moves; the second shows the move and nothing else.
4. Load the plate in the stepper and shoot the poses in order.

The sheets

Recipe

1. First pass: find the main person and the camera motion (background optical flow).
2. Run five pose estimates per frame: MediaPipe streaming, MediaPipe on each frame, MediaPipe on the mirror image, YOLO11x, and YOLO11x mirrored. Fuse them, fix left and right swaps against the previous frame, and smooth inside each shot.
3. Lift the pose to 3D with depth and a solved camera. Take the head's tilt from the eye and ear line and its turn from the nose against the ears.
4. Build Boone as 3D cards: each limb is a card of its photograph that turns about its own bone to face the camera; the torso and head are boxes with the front photo and cardboard sides.
5. Ray-cast a rooftop around him: tiled roof, parapet, city panorama, haze, all in one floor frame, so turning the frame by the measured orbit angle turns the world.
6. Open and close on the clock that gave the film its name. Its hands are drawn about the photographed hub: on the way in the second hand's ticks stretch out, slowing into bullet time; on the way out the hands race, then settle.

The sheets

Recipe

1. Fake it first: one photo, layered parallax, labelled on screen as a simulation, because one photograph has one viewpoint.
2. Film Boone holding one pose while the stool turns. Nine phone clips.
3. Per frame, track points on the disc top, fit one ellipse to all of them, and take the turn as the median angular step. Use the wall trim to remove camera shake.
4. Find hands in the frame and skip those frames. In one clip that was 156 of 557.
5. With the wall masked out, run structure-from-motion on the cut-out frames. Boone is rigid, so the solve gives the camera relative to him: the orbit.
6. Give Marble 2 the rooftop and the camera that matches the footage: Boone 1.8 m, lens 0.47 m up and 4.2 m away, aimed at his middle. Generate views every 5° in batches, each batch conditioned on the posed roof and the most recent views, so it stays the same roof.
7. For each frame of the lean, take the view nearest the angle the reference's camera wants and the photo nearest that angle, stand him 1.45 m tall through that view's camera, and add a contact shadow and bullets fixed in the world.

The sheets

Recipe

1. Build the world in cardboard: kraft roof tiles with marker seams and packing tape, cardboard parapets, a skyline of flats with marker windows and shipping stamps, a painted-paper sky with tissue clouds.
2. Re-pace the lean: a real-time dodge, a ramp down, then bullet time at 0.55× with one continuous camera, held wide while he dodges.
3. Swap his real pose photos as he leans, and pass the paper bullets by his real body.
4. Shoot the rest as short scenes: arms up with two cardboard guns, the recoil, an empty click, the agent's gun close to the lens firing at tiny Boone, the fall, lying, sitting up.
5. End on shipping labels: each credit slaps on with a red rubber-stamp role and peels off, and Boone peeks in between.

The sheets

What it teaches

• When the effects share the puppet's material, the film reads as one made world. A glowing tracer would be the only non-cardboard thing on screen.
• A visible fishing line answers "how does the bullet move?" on screen instead of hiding it.

Recipe

1. Write the story as times on screen: fire at 1.62 s, let go at 3.9, walk 4.4 to 9.0, turn, hold at 9.7, the bullet drops at 12.6, full speed again at 13.6.
2. Draw the world's rate as a piecewise-linear curve through those times, and integrate it to get world seconds.
3. Run every object except Boone on world seconds: the bullet, the guns, the casing, the fishing line, the clock's second hand.
4. In his field the bullet slows to a stop 0.42 m in front of him, integrated so it never jumps. He takes its momentum and slides back.
5. Make the sound from the same events: cardboard taps, a thud, the guns' clatter, a brass tink, the line going slack.

The sheets

What it teaches

• Writing "time stops" as two clocks makes the rule exact: you can ask any object which clock it is on.
• v3 slowed everything down. v4 splits the world from Boone, and that split is the story.

Recipe

1. Make a test animatic from the TV-plate stills: a slow move toward Boone on each, hard cuts on the beat. The two stills with broadcast logos are left out.
2. Ray-march an ice tunnel in numpy: scalloped walls, icicles, a glassy floor, a mouth opening onto a sunset ridge. It returns depth as well as colour, so the ice can hide Boone and the drops.
3. Hang hundreds of drops. Advance each drop's clock by the local rate every frame.
4. One drop lands on his head and he slips. The floor sends him spinning down the cave, and the turntable photos are the spin.
5. Make the drips, plinks and the slide from the same drop clocks, re-run offline.

The sheets

Recipe

1. Set a cardboard diorama in front of found film. The porch TV plays a home movie that freezes on a father holding his baby.
2. Mix three kinds of picture in one frame. Real turntable photos are used in the quiet moments and AI pose sprites in the action, with drawn in-betweens between sprite keys.
3. Cut every word from the archive: letters read off title cards and signs by OCR and cut out with a margin of their own background, like a ransom note.
4. Make the leaves physical: kicked up by his feet, landing on his head and sliding off, the pile bursting when he falls into it. Every landing and kick becomes a sound.
5. Make every leaf a small window onto found film. The ones he tapes back play on screen time, a little warmer: the rescued ones keep running.
6. Score it with fingerpicked guitar and banjo, a bowed violin, a pad and a looped vocal "ha". When he stops time, the music freezes on its last instant and slowly darkens, each taped leaf plucks one note, and the band comes back mid-bar.

The sheets

Recipe

1. Compile the assets. Every sprite and prop becomes its own PNG and record with a pivot, sockets and where it came from. Boone's identity marks are drawn on in code: ink eyes and smile, a pin at each temple, the frayed white scarf. The atlases are checked pixel for pixel against their sources.
2. Rig Boone from one pose sprite with two-bone IK on his arms and legs. Draw the trout crew in code as cut paper, because the painted crew in the plate could not be separated.
3. Draw the inlet box in section as a cardboard diorama, and the place before the street as a reconstruction, labelled on screen the whole time it is shown.
4. Author the ten states. Read every track from them and render the passage with its own cameras.
5. Give the passage production sound only, in four spaces: the street, the iron throat, the concrete chamber, the creek.
6. Have a separate critic, who sees only the renders and the frame grabs, judge each version against named criteria. Fix and repeat.

The sheets

What it teaches

• Keep three kinds of claim apart: verified local record (Boone Creek was once called Kraut Creek), character belief (the foreman's plan) and invented rule (the clock). Only the verified facts appear in the credits.
• A limitations page written beside the film says what it doesn't do. This one runs 3:28 against a 4–6 minute target.

Recipe

1. Read the patch, its words and its found clip from the lab's own files.
2. Stage Boone with the rig from the previous box, and key his beats to her word times.
3. Play each shot in front of the Cels and Spine-Cut cuts at the same suite second.
4. Make a paper-collage version from the poet's stills, and add a lane in the page's own sprite format.

The sheets