Sunday, January 20, 2013
Making Stuff: Stop Motion Animation Option
Stop motion animation is a process by which physically
manipulated objects or drawings can be made to look as if they are moving
unaided. It begins with a series of still images taken of a scene wherein
carefully planned, but slight, changes are made in each still shot. Run
together, these still images create the illusion of movement. Digital stop
motion animation is like an analogue flipbook animation created with a digital
still camera and video editing software like Windows Movie Maker or iMovie.
Popular examples of commercial stop motion movies and television series
include: Wallace & Grommit, Chicken Run, Coraline, and James and the GiantPeach, to name but a few. Stop motion animations can be music videos, or
short stories, or full-length movies.
In this workshop, you’ll
learn the basic principles of stop motion animation, and make a short movie of
your own.
Stopmotion animation comes in a range of forms, including:
whiteboard line drawings, hand-drawn images, action figure or doll stop motion,
Lego stop motion, claymation, and so on. Search YouTube for examples, or check
out the following:
· http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtbQ4J3RfQ8 (an example of what's often referred to as "pixelation")
· http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mwQIPodSDY (an example of object animation--in this case, beads on a bead board)
· http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR7pm9HkjoE (this one is just too clever for words!)
· http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t2aqli5Z4E (an example of 2D paper animation)
· http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_whyjdt5Qso (Lego animation)
· http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vZ0iqUS6sg (whiteboard and markers animation)
· http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koZeA5zDbF0 (claymation)
And there are lots of useful affinity spaces available online, including: http://www.aniboom.com and http://www.stopmotionanimation.com
Quick tips and hints: Do a quick trial run of the process first (e.g., five frames + a title and a credit page) to get a fell for the technical dimensions of the process; watch a lot of exemplars of the type of stop motion animation you plan to create; Map out a bit of story idea
first before doing anything else; keep your camera absolutely in the same
position (taping it down if need be); use simple backgrounds; take care with
lighting and shadows (including where you and your team mates' shadows fall); use your camera’s playback setting to check
image quality; tiny movements of key pieces are better than big movements; a
music soundtrack will add extra-dimension to your video, too.
Have fun!
