Stop motion breaks project management in a specific way. In most production, the unit of work is a shot. In stop motion the unit is a frame, and a feature has somewhere north of a hundred thousand of them.
Granularity is the whole problem
Track at the shot level and you lose the ability to say anything useful about progress: a shot is “in progress” for six weeks. Track at the frame level and the tracking itself becomes a full-time job that nobody has budget for.
The teams that get this right pick a third unit — usually a day's shooting on one rig — and make that the thing with a status. It is coarse enough to maintain and fine enough to notice when a set is falling behind.
The rig is the constraint, not the artist
Scheduling stop motion around people is a category error. The scarce resource is the rig: the camera, the lighting state, the set dressed exactly as it was yesterday. An animator can move between rigs. A rig cannot be duplicated without reshooting everything that matched it.
Schedule the rigs and the people follow. Schedule the people and the rigs collide.
Continuity notes belong to the set
The most expensive stop-motion mistakes are continuity errors discovered in edit, and almost all of them trace back to a note living in the wrong place — in an email, in someone's head, in a document named after a date.
Attach continuity to the physical thing it describes. When the note about the puppet's left hand lives on the puppet rather than in a folder, the person who needs it finds it without knowing it exists.
