Ever wanted to do stop motion? Check out our tutorial with stop motion videos here!
Think back to one of the earliest forms of entertainment circa last century—Motion Pictures. The name says it all. Single pictures in sequential motion, giving the appearance of fluidity. If you pause a movie on your DVD player, what do you see? A single picture. Well, stop motion is a more crude form of capturing a movie or video. Rather than rely on the camera's smooth frame rate, you are creating your own. In fact, you are creating each individual frame within an entire sequence.
To take it a step further, you are animating yourself. You're making yourself or objects a real life cartoon by going frame-by-frame and putting all of those individual pictures together to provide motion. "Stop" means you are literally stopping at each frame, or freezing each frame in a certain position to create motion when played back with the rest of the frames in the sequence.
Stop motion is a time-consuming, yet rewarding process when done correctly. It requires prodigious amounts of patience, attention to detail, and a decent chunk of time. You're going to need a decent video editing program, tripod, and a digital camera with video recording or a camcorder.
Tripod and Roll
We found early on that the old-fashioned way to shoot stop motion is the easiest. This involves mounting your camera to a tripod, letting it roll (record video), and positioning yourself or the object sequentially within the frame, freezing for at least two seconds in each position.
For instance, if you're trying to simulate a glide across the living room floor to make it appear as though you're skating on one leg, freeze in the position you want, hold it, take a few steps forward, freeze in that same position again, hold it, and keep repeating until the duration of your action is entirely complete.
When you playback your footage, you'll see a crazy person taking very small steps and freezing in the same position all over the room. But, what you are really doing is making yourself a human keyframe. When you capture your footage in an editing program and begin to cut out the parts where you're in transition and moving to the next frozen position, you begin to come alive.
We recommend trimming each individual clip to about two or three frames. The higher the amount of frames each tiny little clip is, the slower the animation, and vice versa.
The timeline below shows a cluster of clips titled "Take." Each clip is three frames in length.
When you play the clips along the timeline, your subject moves across the screen because each clip corresponds to a different position. The first three "Take" clips in the sequence above look like this on the monitor:
Here's an example of using the tripod and roll method:
You can also merge animation with stop motion. In this example, we used Photoshop to create graphics and simply manipulated them every few frames in Adobe Premiere Pro. Just think of it as a series of pictures—a flipbook. You'll have to go picture by picture, but when it's all finished, you get something like this:
Getting Started
For your first stop motion film, aim for a 10–20 second video. Use either yourself or an object and move across the frame, freezing every few inches or feet, depending on how much of a focal length you have. Start with a simple concept and work your way up from there. If you want to simulate flying, just jump in place and choose the frames that feature you highest in the air.
If you have a friend and a camera with a decent burst mode, you can film "scenes" by having them shoot you in action. In editing, you can just choose every few images, depending on the burst rate. The Casio Exilim EX-FH100 shoots at 15fps, which would be perfect for stop motion, as 30fps would be too fluid.
If you have any problems or want to learn new video tricks, send us feedback and we'll get to it. Also, if you've created your own stop motion video using this tutorial, send us a link and we'll post it.
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