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Stop motion tests

0098386

0098386

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Jan 18, 2005
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I'm working on a stop motion project for a video brief at university. And I finally knocked up a little test project to gauge how many shots I'll need to take for my final one to ensure a smooth video etc.

It's top though! I never knew stop motion could be this much fun to make, and rewarding in motion.

http://satansam.co.uk/vids/duck.mov Is a very short video of a duck spinning around.

http://satansam.co.uk/vids/full.mov Is the directors cut that features one of those wooden stick men turning into a duck! As if by magic. With a strange song in the background.
 
It's a good place to start. The animation is really rough - whether you want it that way is up to you - but the motion isn't very fluid. For stop motion, usually 2 to 3 frames of each still setup will give you very good fluid response.

The thing about any animation is studying how things move around you. For example: a ball falling will start off slow but pick up speed due to velocity. There are other things as well, and the best way is to observe them yourself. Watching films on DVD one frame at a time will help show you this.

If you want to see some masters of Stop Motion, you should check out Jan Svankmajer and Ladislas Starewicz

I love stop motion animation. I don't think I'm very good at it yet, but I get better with each attempt. It's true, it's very time consuming and very rewarding :) :)
 
http://satansam.co.uk/vids/plastixhigh.WMV
I made this one years ago. Bad camera, no practice. just went ahead and 2 days later it was done.

But yea, I know about the velocity and watching motion etc. I tried to get that in there a bit when the guy spins around and turns into the duck. Theres a bit of speed up and slow down.
going off what you said about the bad motion, I'll make another test with double the amount of shots. I only took 70 for this. Probably need at least 150 for 10 seconds of video footage.

Thanks for the names too! I can research them for some extra credit :)
 
raggedjimmi said:
http://satansam.co.uk/vids/plastixhigh.WMV
I made this one years ago. Bad camera, no practice. just went ahead and 2 days later it was done.

But yea, I know about the velocity and watching motion etc. I tried to get that in there a bit when the guy spins around and turns into the duck. Theres a bit of speed up and slow down.
going off what you said about the bad motion, I'll make another test with double the amount of shots. I only took 70 for this. Probably need at least 150 for 10 seconds of video footage.

Thanks for the names too! I can research them for some extra credit :)
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Who did the voices in that? It seriously sounded like wanda sikes and will farrel.
 
jared_kipe said:
Who did the voices in that? It seriously sounded like wanda sikes and will farrel.
Click to expand...

Probably was, I've no idea about a lot of actors so :) It was for a college project, Reanimation or soemthing. Had to splice off 3 minutes of a film/TV show and add your own footage over the top. I thought I'd be cheap and use Lego because there's no lip syncing :D But I made up for that with the length of the project. Apparently!
 
raggedjimmi said:
Probably was, I've no idea about a lot of actors so :) It was for a college project, Reanimation or soemthing. Had to splice off 3 minutes of a film/TV show and add your own footage over the top. I thought I'd be cheap and use Lego because there's no lip syncing :D But I made up for that with the length of the project. Apparently!
Click to expand...

I've seen that before!

Thanks for posting it again, it's just as funny the second time!
 
the fruit of todays labour.

http://satansam.co.uk/vids/drink.mov

Starring Dakota Fanning... I mean my sister Nicole! Never work with children. She kept looking into the camera! I think I can be let off as this is my first *real* stop motion film... right? Still got a long way to go before I start work on my big piece. But we had a lot of fun making this. whenever a picture wasn't being taken she'd be launching her head off. And we really did just improvise. I like how you can see the clock on the oven too, you can see it took 10 minutes to shoot :D
 
OK, I watched this on a G5 at the nearest university and I caught the whole thing in its full glory that my 450g4 wasn't able to churn out in its full framerate. Sorry for my earlier criticism: it was really choppy on my computer and looked so much worse than when I caught it on a better computer.

Ah! I feel like such a jack ass!

Keep up the good work!
 
Good stop motion animation has a plan. I dont know how you are capturing your footage, but if its a camcorder/device that allows you to take an ACTUAL SINGLE FRAME at a time, awesome. Otherwise you might have one that has a feature that captures one still over 2-10 frames. In that case, youd need to use a video editor to cut it down to an actual 24-30fps work. Removing the extra clones of each shot so that they are actually one single frame.

print out a spreadsheet with the top rows as follows:

Scene / Action / Camera Position / anything you might need

now you will list each Scene and the Actions therein, one at a time. And when I say EACH action, i mean REALLY each action. Everything from fingers moving to eyebrows and tiny things like that. If something happens at the same time, like "close fist and raise arm" then list it as so. You will get into your own way of writing it down so you can understand it best.

What you need to do is decide how to regiment your shots/moves. If someone is walking in the scene, get up and walk yourself. How long does it take to complete the move? How long does it take to move your left foot from one position to the next? Etc etc.

Knowing the timing of "reality" will then let you "Plan" how to shoot certain stuff in stop motion.

Most likely you will be doing a 24 fps video. In which case, when you know it should take 1 second to do something, you will need to divide the action in 24 distinct "moves" each of which you will shoot one at a time.

It sucks, but its the only way to get things to look right.

If you want that "homemade" look, dont worry about things actually taking 24 shots per second of realtime movement, just trust your instincts.

this is just for anyone wanting some helpful info
 
http://satansam.co.uk/vids/magicfull.mov

The full one. I wrote out a big message but it didn't send. ho hum. I thanked everyone for helping, I'll use the advice for the final project. Which I'll be starting in 1 week. and that FCE HD messed up the frames at one point, but I thought it looked quite nifty.

oh, the name thing was inspired by "I use magic" ;)
 
raggedjimmi said:
http://satansam.co.uk/vids/magicfull.mov

The full one. I wrote out a big message but it didn't send. ho hum. I thanked everyone for helping, I'll use the advice for the final project. Which I'll be starting in 1 week. and that FCE HD messed up the frames at one point, but I thought it looked quite nifty.

oh, the name thing was inspired by "I use magic" ;)
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Totally bueno, man. Keep on creating.
 
Has anyone here tried using Boinx Software's "iStopMotion?" It is an awesome program that was made specifically for creating stop motion animation. It's dirt cheap and has great time saving features like onion skinning (ghost of your previous frame), etc. My company is working on several HD animations and believe me, iStopMotion is an essential tool. Boinx makes the most iLife-like software outside of Apple. If you go to their main page you can see samples of other people's work.

Check it out:

http://www.istopmotion.com/
 
Texas04 said:
Very Cool, and I love the music
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thank Mr. Scruff for the music. It's a track called "Blackfoot Roll". extremely repetitive though. The music track I'll end up making for my final piece will more than definitely be inspired by Mr. Scruff's music.
 
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