Lionel Orozco, Armature Maker/Blogger

Lionel Orozco (source: Facebook)

The brother of the amazing armature machinist and stop motion blogger Lionel Ivan Orozco sent us some sad news last week. Daniel said that Lio is in bad health and may not be with us for much longer.

Lio has been keeping the world up to date with stop motion related news on his site Stop Motion Works. You can see his last news post which is full of fun videos and info on the Nightmare Before Christmas over here from August. He also has lots of articles on his site, helpful links and a rich history of little known facts.

Lio's claim to fame was is in making armatures for many big names. He worked on the classic Gumby show, Nightmare Before Christmas, the PJ's from Will Vinton Studios, Phil Tippets Jurrasic Park and more.

Lio was the one to help write up the ball and socket armature tutorials in my book Secrets of Clay Animation Revealed. He was helpful in writing about the intricacies of drilling, filing, soldering and pickling the metal parts for puppets. Things that no doubt helped many stop motion film makers over the years.

We used to joke about competing with one another to be the first to break the latest stop motion news on the web. At one time Lio and I were the only ones to do so, but we never thought of each other as competition. That was the nice thing about Lio was we both had a goal to keep the art going. He was always level headed, soft spoken, kind and informative.

Here is the message his brother wanted to release to update everyone in our stop motion community. It sounds like he is in good hands.

"Lionel Orozco is currently in hospice care in South San Francisco. He has pancreatic cancer and this all happened very quickly, within the last four months. His brain is active and on fire, he is ALIVE, but his body is sadly failing him. We’ve not been close for many years, and I think many of you probably know him more intimately than I ever did, and that gratifies me, in speaking to some of you, discovering the depths of the man I didn’t know very well. While he’s always been a solitary man, he’s never, I realize, been alone. Thank you. I think my brother is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known—a true autodidact, able to figure out and do anything on his own. The intricacies of his art and craft always eluded me—to be honest when he started going on and on AND ON about it, it kind of bored me—but I was always amazed and slightly intimidated by his knowledge and passion and pure nerd-geek-LOVE of what he did. I’ve never felt that about anything, and I admired him for that purity of engagement with a thing he loved. Years ago I invited him to move up to where I live in Moscow, Idaho, and he finally took me up on the offer in July, but too late I’m afraid. He is resting comfortably, as comfortably as he can. I call him every day. I love my brother."

If you knew Lio and would like to get a message his way, contact me and I can relay messages for his brother to read to him. It would lift his spirits to let him know he made a difference. You can contact me at the e-mail address: marc@animateclay.com