Movie making is all about creating a unique world of make believe.
With stop-motion animation, you can bring any of these dolls to life as a living character in your movie.
Sound fun? Read on!
Stop-motion animation is a style of film animation you have no doubt seen before, but might not have known what it was, how it was done, or even what to call it. It’s a fairly easy form of animation you can do without any special equipment or software, so it makes a fun project for beginners.
There are many styles of animation, stop-motion is just one form. The first animations around 100-years ago became the de facto standard and used drawings on celluloid.
Stop-motion uses physical objects such as a doll or a toy. In this way, it is similar to filming live actors, except dolls need to have you move them and provide a voice.
This article will explain how it’s done and show video examples from my junior high school media students.
For background info, first read this post about frame rates. Understanding frame rates is necessary in order to understand all forms of animation.
What is Stop-Motion Animation?
Stop Motion Animation is also called stop and go animation, stop frame animation, and stop animation.
In traditional animation, drawings or another form of flat, 2-D image, are used instead of live actors. A different drawing is used for each individual frame of the movie. Remembering that film has 24 frames per second and video 30 fps, you can see that a film of any length would take an enormous number of drawings. Various methods are used to simulate 3D.
With stop-motion animation, a physical object, such as a doll (or the piggy house shoes pictured above) is used instead of drawings.
Usually, the object is small enough to be filmed and maneuvered on the floor or a table-top.
One advantage to stop-motion animation over traditional is that you can create a realistic 3D visual through lighting and object placement on the tabletop. (A video posted at the bottom of the page shows pros doing it.)
As in traditional animation, when done properly, each frame of stop-motion animation will show the object in a slightly different position, which creates the illusion of movement. It is the job of the animator to photograph the object in various stages of movement. This is an exceptionally time-consuming and tedious task.
In respect to frame rates and the tiny differences needed to create an accurate, smooth movement, stop-and go animation is like traditional animation. This means miniscule incremental differences in position to create smooth, fluid movement. Every one second of finished film would need either 24 or 30 individual frames.
This is why patience is required. 🙂
Beyond using a tripod and keeping your camera rock-solid steady, the trick to making stop-motion look right is to modify the position of the object in tiny increments that mimic the way real movement would look, seen frame by frame.
Written Example
Let’s say you want your object to appear as though it were raising its hand. This is a movement that takes about 1 second, so we’ll have 30 frames in a video and 24 frames per second in film (Using default fps) to make the complete movement.
In your first frame, the hand should be at the doll’s side in a down position. In the next frame, the hand would move ever so slightly, to begin the trajectory up. The next frame would move the arm up just a tiny bit more, so on and so on. After the correct number of frames for one second, the arm would finally be fully extended.
Played back normally, the frames added together create a smooth, one-second movement of the doll raising its hand.
Obviously, it is critical nothing is moved accidentally. If the camera moves, the finished animation will be jumpy. If the object moves in too large of increments, it will also look choppy. There is a lot that can go wrong here! This is one reason I thought it was such a good lesson for my students.
Professional animation companies like Disney male films of animals moving so they can study frame-by frame movement of real animals and then imitate it frame-by-frame. How far does a lion’s leg move in 1/30 of a second? Animators know! (A video posted at the bottom of this page shows you.)
STUDENT VIDEO EXAMPLES
This first video example is a national-award winning video done by my third-year students, so it’s pretty sophisticated for a high school student video production. It took the group of 8 kids about three months to produce the entire show. The stop-motion animation comes in at :40, with the piggy house shoes, a porcelain doll and a Tonka Truck being the animated characters.
This video runs a total of about ten minutes. The animation makes up just a small portion of the total.
These other videos below were all created in class by my first-year junior high school students, so these animations are much simpler. The assignment was to create a commercial for any product they wished, using stop-motion animation. As teacher, I brought in some of my knickknacks to use as objects to animate, but if they wanted to bring in their favorite object, that was fine too.
We had already covered producing commercials and basic marketing, so this assignment built upon those lessons. (You don’t have to do it that way. The assignment can simply be :15 seconds of animation of any object, set to royalty-free music.)
The main learning object for this lesson is to learn frame rates in a way they’ll never forget. Frame rates might seem a bit boring, but are critical to understand if you want to understand film and video production.
Either a still camera or a video camera could be used. A still camera makes it a bit easier. If you use a regular video camera, you will need to take a few seconds of each pose and then isolate one frame while editing. I feel this is great practice for beginning editors, though students might will object.
- NOTE: There are several apps on the market that take the tedium out of stop-motion animation and allow you to animate after having taken only 1 shot of your object. These can be fun, but students don’t learn much. The app does all the work!
When you watch the videos below, it’s easy to see who was patient and who wasn’t. Seeing the poorly done videos is a learning experience in and off itself, since the errors are so glaring and drive home the point. I am not trying to embarrass anyone. There was no shame in my class for less-than perfect videos. I consider mistakes a learning experience.
US Army Commercial
This video advertising the US army was the single best video out of all my classes. It was created by a group of three 6th graders. These boys were terrific students and loved their Legos! In fact, they went above and beyond and produced TWO videos for this assignment. The longer, second one is at the bottom of the post and uses video from the Army they got off the internet in addition to their animation, which was a bit different from the short version. These students worked hard and had fun doing it. That’s a teacher’s dream! A+.
Barrett commercial
This commercial for barrettes had moderately well-done animation of the doll walking. Since the individual limbs of the doll were not moveable, the “walking”was created by moving the doll a little bit diagonally for each step. To me, this was fne for the assignment. I did not want to bring in a porcelain doll for risk of having it be broken.
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This commercial for an eye-care product did not get a very good grade for the animation, but I liked the train of thought used to create the product. I had brought in the alien ornament with one giant eye, which spurred them to think of eye care. They originally used a pop song about seeing clearly, but that was removed on YouTube for copyright reasons. As you can see, the movement of the alien ornament does not look very organized. The green screen also has some issues, but that’s another assignment.
The movement is better with this animated troll doll, but still not very good. They used a shortcut to the frame-byframe tedium by lifting the doll up by the hair, with their hand cropped out.
This chocolate egg commercial also displays erratic and unplanned movements. It was difficult for students to see the movement in their minds and then create it by moving the object on the table-top. I suggested using easier to visualize, straight line movement. It also helps to cut to closeups of the character’s face within the sequence. That helps the audience know who is speaking and can be a break in the animation.
This commercial for super gel got better grades for its commercial aspect than its animation. They were trying to simulate hair blowing, but didn’t keep the doll itself steady.
This longer version of the Army commercial used a different script and different footage. The “airplane” in this video is not really animated, but it still looks like it is moving. That is because the background behind it moves. This was a concept I had covered with them before in a different assignment on perspective on the film and video screen. The boys produced this video just for fun, which is a wonderful thng imho!
BACKGROUND INFO
Here are some addition resources for better understanding of animation.
First, here is a short (under ten minutes) video demonstration that shows the animation process for The Lion King. See the animators copy real lions!
This 6:30 video shows the team at Laika Studios as they made the stop-motion animated film, Missing Link.
Walt Disney himself explains animation and his new inventive camera techniques with this 7:20 short film produced back in 1957. See Mickey Mouse move!
Food For Thought Discussion Questions
- Do you think you could now recognize stop-motion animation from other forms of animation? What differences would you look for?
- Creating animation requires some math. If you want to make ten seconds of animation, how many individual still pictures would you need?
- When you watched the student animations, what simple mistake did you see repeatedly?
- Do you have a favorite inanimate object you’d like to animate?