How to Do Stop Motion Animation

Transcript Hi, my name is Joe Vena. I’m the creative director of the Children’s Museum of the Arts Media Lab and I’ve been with the museum for almost ten years now. I teach stop motion animation and clay sculpture at our clay bar and I love it. Something I love about teaching stop motion animation …

Transcript How do you animate clouds? This is a good question, and there are various answers to it, depending on the direction you want to go as an artist. I prefer animating clouds with cotton. So I’ll take cotton batting either from the inside of a stuffed animal or from a bag of cotton. You …

Transcript So we’re going to animate a flying bird. As with so much in the stop motion realm, there are different approaches we can take. We’re going to animate our flying bird with a paper cutout style, using our multi-plane to give us two layers, a layer for our sky and the layer for our …

Transcript So it’s fun to pick living creatures and animate those, and we’re going to try out a little animating of some swimming fish. There are, as with so many elements of stop motion animation, there are many ways to approach and attack animating swimming fish. We are going to use actual fish pictures in …

Transcript A fantastic thing to practice animating are explosions. Explosions are, of course, can be very serious things, but in the case of animating, we can enjoy them, have a little fun. This is going to be a very, very lighthearted explosion. It will be a candy explosion. I have a piece of hard candy …

Transcript When you’re creating a stop-motion animation, it’s fund to give yourself challenges. One particular challenge I really enjoy is the animation of fire. This is something you can do in many, many different ways. We’re going to find one fire trick right now. I am going to share it with you. We have our …

Transcript So we have a fully realized, nearly fully realized, armature here. We’ve got some workable hands. We’ve given a tail to this armature as well. I think the next step would be adding a head. We’ll make this a basic sort of a cat-inspired creature, so we’re going to make a cat head for …

Transcript So you have a wonderful puppet ready to go here. Perhaps you would like to add some details. A really wonderful, sometimes challenging, detail to give your puppet would be hands so that the puppet can grip things, pick them up, raise up a finger with an idea, give a thumbs up, etc. I …

Transcript So, how do you make a good, sturdy puppet for animation? There are a number of ways that you could create a puppet for your animation. I like to start with a wire armature and build from that wire armature. So, I take some aluminum wire, kind of a thinner gauge like this. And …

Transcript So when you’re approaching a more complicated puppet and how to animate that puppet, a few good things to keep in mind is that your puppet’s feet are nice and flat there and they’re sturdy. They’re holding your puppet up. In some cases, animators would drill the feet into the floor for each step. …

Transcript So when you’re creating a stop motion animation, it’s good to go in with a plan. Sometimes executing something very simple like making an item grow or shrink can be a lot of fun. In this case, we are going to use clay to make some shapes shrink and then possibly grow again in …

Transcript We have our clay face. We are going to animate the clay face to blink. And what we do to make the character blink is take some clay. It can be the same color as the clay you’re already using or a different color. We’re using the same color here. And I create a …

Transcript We’ve created a clay face to make a stop-motion animated film with. We’re going to bring this face to life right now. We have our face all set up here, ready to go. He’s made of clay. His eye brows and his mustache are also made of clay. The only thing not-clay here are …

Transcript So a really great stop motion animation exercise is to create a face and animate that face. And we create that face out of clay. We’ll start with a larger piece and an extra piece of clay here. I’m going to sculpt the face out of this clay, and I’ll save this piece for …

Transcript Once you’ve created your clay character, perhaps you’d like to make a place for the character to animate in. Dressing your set in an animation is important, of course, and there are many directions you can go in. We’re going to be working with a camera directly in front of us, shooting against this …

Transcript So if you’d like to make a clay character or a clay puppet to be animated, there area few great tips I can give you. First, get some clay. The clay that you animate with is really up to you. There are a variety of modeling clays on the market. You’re probably looking for …

Transcript So you can create stop motion animated films with so many different types of materials. I think one of the most effective materials to use, of course, would be clay. And clay is a great great material for stop motion animation because it’s so easy to change the form of clay. When animating with …

Transcript So it’s good to know that when you’re animating found objects, you can animate with almost any object you can find though some objects work better than others. For example, animating with a block may prove easier than animating with a ball because the block will stay where you put it whereas the ball …

Transcript One of my favorite ways to create stop motion animation is through using a multiplane. And what a multiplane allows you to do is add a layer to your film, add a layer to your animation. And you can build multiplanes that will give you numerous layers. In this case of this multiplane here, …

Transcript So you don’t always have to make a plan when you’re creating a stop motion animation, but it’s a pretty good idea to go in with a plan. And one way to plan is by creating a storyboard. Many film directors use storyboards, and they use different styles of storyboards. what a storyboard basically …

Transcript So, if you would like to set up your own stop motion animation studio, there are many different directions you can go in. Here’s one of them. I have a digital video camera, fairly compact model, rigged up to a C-stand by a clamp right here and it’s pointing down to the surface right …

Transcript What is stop motion animation? Stop motion animation is basically when you take a photograph of something and you change that subject you’re photographing in a very small way and you take another picture and you change it and you take another picture and you manually change it. Take another picture and you change …

Transcript How to animate water is a great question, and there are so many different ways to animate water in stop motion animation. One way that I like to do it is with clear hair gel. Now this can get a little bit messy, of course. Keep this in mind if you’re trying it. But …