Stop Motion Techniques

You've a bunch of different stop motion techniques available to you. Pupperty, claymation, pixelation, using found objects or a combination of all of them. Below I've put down some relevant information on each of the techniques.


PUPPERTY

This is pretty advanced stuff and it's unlikely you'll go ahead and make puppets. However, the principals of it are the same for, say, claymation. A technique you're more likely to use.

Here's an interesting bit of history about pupperty stop motion from one of the forerunners of the technique.




CLAYMATION

Here's an excellent backgrounder to the making of a clay mation advertisement. You can see the use of green screens is important and you'll see how they set up their studios - similar in many ways to your little studios.

Claymation is a fun and flexible way to do stop motion and you can often get great effects, however, it does take a fair bit of organisation and more creative thought you might imagine to really 'animate' scenes and come up with interesting ideas that don't look amateurish.




Here's a very simple, very clever, little animation. There's a character, an environment, a problem and a resolution. (CONFLICT and RESOLUTION). Although, I don't think the resolution is as big a big pay off as it could be. I wonder how the story could have developed it they'd thought about it more? It has a tragic (down) rather than an upbeat (up) ending. Funny. I think aiming for this sort of standard is a good goal for the class of Extended Dips.


Citoplasmas en medio ácido, stop motion film from citoplasmas on Vimeo.

Check out more great stuff on their website:
http://www.motionn.com/search/label/Stop%20motion


PIXELATION

You'll have experience of this already most likely. Pixelation has a number of advantages and disadvantages. You can imagine if you have to film, say, outdoors, then suddenly all the controllable elements of animation (because its nearly always shot in a studio environment) go out the window. Suddenly your prone to weather, light and other environmental factors. However, the results can often be stunning BECAUSE your outside a studio environment.

Check out the brillant Tony vs Paul. Much imitated but never bettered. Yet.




USING FOUND OBJECTS

Pixelation and using found objects have a lot in common: in Pixelation the found object is the person. Using found objects changes the nature of the storytelling (in some instances it can destroy the story since you are relying on what you have found rather than pushing through your vision, like you might with if you were making characters from scratch in Claymation)

However, its not to be discounted. Here's a mix of pixelation and found objects together. Not bad.



Here's an awesome use of objects. (not neccessarily 'found' but in a way they are!)