Stop motion is challenging enough as it is, you really want to try and make your life as easy as possible wherever possible. If you can do something an easier way, and it won't compromise your results, then that is the way to do it.
How did I make my life easier with Genre Neutral?
My film had a bank of bookshelves on the back wall. These shelves are only ever seen from the angle you see in this image, front on. Knowing this meant it wasn't really necessary to construct full books or a free standing set of shelves - I could use the back wall of my set to simply glue book spines on instead. The wood is real, and painted to look miniature, but the shelves are shallow and just deep enough for my book spines to sit on.
Making the books spines was a repetitive and mindful process. I made most of them whilst sat watching the tennis, the best way to work when you can.
My process began with cutting strips of card at the correct height for a book spine. I varied this very slightly on some strips to create height variety.
The next step was to cut the strips into book spine sized chunks, again I varied these so that some books would be fatter than others.
Each of these little coloured card pieces would become an individual book spine.
The plan was to organise these books in order of the LGBTQIA+ pride flag colours - this was a film commissioned to celebrate identity and I wanted it to feel like that throughout the films design.
I tested a sequence of spines to make sure they looked nice together, they did.
Several hours later I started to get there with the spines... although like most creative things, they did take longer to curl than one might imagine.
Making simple spines like this though was definitely a lot faster than making hundreds of perfect little books for the shelves.
To Conclude
Remember only make what you need to, only animate what you need to too. If you can make your life easier in any way, do it.