Stop motion and animation

[GoofKing]

Now that I got my camera, I'm wanting to experiment around with stop motion and make fun little flash Gifs of objects moving around. I also have this idea of a Harry Potter like short stop motion movie of me waving a stick and things moving, maybe have it cleans my room lol

I dunno how to get things to jump in the air without my hand or arm being in the pictures thought. I think it was my mother who first got me into stop motion when I was twelve and the one who showed me how to do it.

Animation is something I'm still trying to figure out as I did some thinking and concluded that I would need to not only draw the background but maybe use transparent sheets of plastic for the characters and the different movements they do. That way I could just lay them over the background one by one without having to re draw the background over and over again with the characters.

Have you guys ever experimented around with animation or stop motion before ?

 

[wyverary]

As a matter of fact, I have. I got some interesting results, but I wasn't interested enough to pursue it further...without any sort of guidebook or anything, I could only learn through trial and error. I imagine, though, that software has gotten better, as well. If you're really interested, I highly encourage spending some time messing around with it. I found it rather fun.

 

[IContainMultitudes]

I've done little experiments with stop motion stuff here and there, but never anything much more ambitious than a little GIF animation.

This is something that's pretty amazing, it's a short film made as a proof of concept for a feature that the director wants to make:

It's based on a great comic called Usagi Yojimbo, some of you might know it from the guest appearances that the main character made in the 80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. I once met the creator, Stan Sakai, and a con once, he's a super-nice guy, I highly recommend meeting him if you get a chance (he somehow still manages to make regular con appearances despite spending a lot of his time caring for his severely ill wife).

 

[Judge]

Have you guys ever experimented around with animation or stop motion before ?

Not personally, but I sure vicariously enjoyed listening to Ray Harryhausen talk about the details of his great career. I know some of the DVDs like "Earth Versus The Flying Saucers" have some nice added features such as interviews with Mr. Harryhausen.

Of course I'm a huge fan of his sequence of the fighting skeletons in "Jason And The Argonauts". Stop motion at its finest, integrated with actual footage.

 

[GoofKing]

I've not tried stop motion with my digital yet; I need to try it some time. When I had an 8mm camera, I made a lot of stop motion movies using models I built, It was a lot of fun, so I can only imagine what the quality would be like now since technology has improved over the past 40 years.

I wanted to try something with a pencil moving around and drawing on a piece of paper but not sure how I could avoid having my hands or arms in the shots.

 

[Vanilla]

Ive done traditional hand-drawn, and 3D animation, but I've only done stop motion once before. In the short stop-mo film we were making, we only planned for one instance where an object would need to be off the ground. We used fishing wire, then had to Photoshop it out later (very tedious work - especially when you consider animation generally uses 25-30 frames per second, and the object being thrown was in the air for about 2 seconds). I'm sure there are more practical ways to do it, but it was a short project, just to get us familiar with the medium.

Might be good to look up Aardman Animations (makers of Wallace and Grommit) to see how they deal with gravity. I imagine you could use supports to hold them up, but need to be clever to ensure they are hidden from the camera's point of view.

Otherwise, you could try compositing it if you're that way inclined. Adobe After Effects can help with that. I've tried compositing a 3D character on to a live action film, but never tried it with stop motion, but I imagine the technique should be just as successful.

Aardman: Aardman​

Techniques similar to my fishing wire idea:

After Effects (motion tracking):

 

[IContainMultitudes]

Here's a stop-motion music video some of you will probably enjoy:

Another example of stop-motion animation using people instead of models, which is sometimes called "pixilation":

Pixilation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia