Stop Motion Animation

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

The art of stop motion requires patience, imagination and a great deal of time.

Stop Motion is a type of animation performed by having an object, lets say a palm sized movable figure of a human, you move his/her leg a very tiny bit and then take a picture, then you move it again, take a picture and so forth, it’s a very long drawn out process but in the end, your figure will be walking once you have put the pictures together in a program.

Now it is much more difficult than that, if you want your Stop Motion animation to look professional, you will need a controlled environment and controlled lighting so the light doesn’t change every time you take a photo, like in the direct sun light is a bad idea.

There are many places this technique is used; one of my favorite movies, ‘Coraline’, uses this technique. I have to tell you, if you haven’t seen that movie, go watch it, it is fantastic! I cannot forget my all-time favorite Wallace and Gromit! And The Nightmare before Christmas!

Stop Motion has a long history in the film industry, it’s been used to move objects as if it happened by magic!  Here is a bizarre but very awesome Stop Motion animation called, it’s a bird, made in the early 1930’s and it is indeed a metal-eating bird. It is seriously impressive, especially since it was made in the 1930’s!

What types of Stop Motion are there?

There are other types of Stop Motion; my favorite is Claymation, if you haven’t already guessed it is Stop Motion using modeling clay.

There are other types of Stop Motion such as Toy-Mation where they use Lego men and Lego. There are just normal everyday items that people make into a Stop Motion film. Here is a guy called Pesfilm and he does a very cool little Stop Motion video called ‘Western Spaghetti’. I’m not sure if this is Stop Motion, I’m pretty sure it is but we’re on the topic of animation so it doesn’t matter.

I have been into Stop Motion animation for quite a while, I have tried a few times and kind of lost interest in trying it, I need a better camera and set up, like I said earlier you need a fairly good set up to have a professional looking video, but there’s nothing stopping you using paper as a backdrop and a lamp!

My final thoughts on Stop Motion Animation

I think Stop Motion is a very awesome technique and everybody should give it a go it’s great fun and you can make some very awesome clips. Stop Motion has been around for a long time, there are some people out there that can make a clip look so smooth, to make something look real you must take very little movements with you figure and many, many photos, take coraline for instance, I can’t even imagine how many photos they took in that movie.  So give Stop Motion a go, it takes patience but you won’t regret it!  

This blog post was written by my son, Jesse Ranson.