From the course: Telling Your Story on the Web in 60 Seconds

What is stop motion animation?

From the course: Telling Your Story on the Web in 60 Seconds

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

What is stop motion animation?

“

- A very popular genre for web-based content is stop motion animation. And while this truly is an art form for some amazing movies that you've seen, it's also really easy to do, even with a smartphone or a tablet. We're going to stick with a mirrorless or DSLR camera for a little more control, but you can absolutely do this with even a smartphone, and there are great, fantastic apps out there that make it really simple to do so. What we're going to do is really just put together a series of shots. Stop motion animation is a technique where you capture individual frames and then reassemble those into a movie. Typically, when your camera records video, it's recording between 24 and 60 frames per second, but really for something like a stop motion animation, that feels a little bit choppy. Well, it really only needs about four frames a second. So we're going to capture a series of still images, but in the case of creating content, where an object moves in or moves out, it's not just going to suddenly pop or appear. We're going to move it a small little bit at a time and that will create the sense of it moving and growing or expanding or sliding. So little tiny movements. The more time you have and the more patience you have, the more little tiny movements you can make. Stop motion animation really involves a pretty straightforward process. Build the scene, and a lot of times it's actually easier to build the scene in the end state and then take it back apart. More on that later. Set up the camera so it can see the scene and get your camera in a manual mode. You don't want it to change settings over time. So if you don't have the ability to go to true manual mode, look for a downloadable app for your camera that gives you manual camera controls. Or make sure you put the camera in manual mode and lock the exposure and lock the focus. I'm going to be using a mirrorless camera with a manual lens so I've set the focus by hand and the camera's not going to seek for autofocus. You don't want it changing or shifting or breathing as it's shooting because you'll see sudden drifts over time where things expand or look a little bit different. The key here is lock it all down. All right, let's take a look at how we set up this particular scene and I'll walk you through the major steps.

Contents