Stop Motion Animation – iMac & Plane Story Boards

With all my renders completed I used my earlier created template in Photoshop and then added the renders and text:

Stop Motion Animation – iMac & Plane Idea Renders

Using cubes, splines and planes I created a high poly iMac like the one we have at school. I created some windows exactly like the ones in the college and a desk too. I duplicated the iMac along the table and added a HDRI images to a huge dome surrounded the scene to create a realistic environment outside the windows and to provide realistic lighting and reflections. I added some lighting and put a background image on each of the macs which I had taken from the internet earlier. I then went ahead and grabbed an image of a single rotary engine plane, used the alpha tab in the material editor to alpha map the white around the plane, then added it to the scene and took renders the plane flying across the macs.

Stop Motion Animation – String Idea Story Boards

With all my renders completed I used my earlier created template in Photoshop and then added the renders and text:

Stop Motion Animation – String Idea Renders

Using reference images as blue prints, I modelled out high poly models of a glue stick, a mug and a table leg. I also used the Sweep Nurbs tool to create a long tube (the string) using splines. This allowed me to move individual points in the spline to move the string object around it. After adding materials to all the models and setting up some basic lighting, I began to move the string a little, render a frame, move the string a little, render a frame and so on. Eventually I had 16 renders which were ready to be put into story boards:

Stop Motion Animation – Shoe Idea Story Boards

With all my renders completed I used my earlier created template in Photoshop and then added the renders and text:

Stop Motion Animaton – Shoe Idea Renders

I grabbed some reference shots off the internet of a pair of vans and laid them into Cinema4D. Starting from a cube, I began to cut and extrude faces to eventually model a low poly shoe. I then used the “Hyper Nurbs” tool to add and smoothen the low poly into a high poly model. I duplicated the model, gave it a simple material, quickly modelled some stairs and a platform, created some basic lighting and took renders after moving the shoes in a walking fashion. Here are the renders:

Stop Motion Animation – Plane Idea Story Boards

With all my renders completed I made a story board template in Photoshop and then added the renders and text.

Stop Motion Animation – Plane Idea Renders

Plane Idea

I began this idea by drawing out a plan of my college room and drawing a path which the plane would follow. This would help me model the room as well as fly the plane in the right direction. Using the accurate sketch of the room I had drawn I began to model the room and its basic objects, like tables, desks, iMacs and keyboards. After modelling a simple plane I went ahead and made a rig so that where ever I moved the Camera Object the plane object would always be directly in front of it. This meant I could simple move the camera to the next point and not have to worry about the plane, which would move with the camera automatically. The scene was simple and low poly, so rendering it out looked kind of dull and boring. So I used the “Sketch & Toon” render engine to create some fun shading and colours. The geometry was not optimised and was a bit messy in places, but it was only a simple render and would not affect the outcome in any way.

After moving the camera and plane and taking all the renders into photoshop, I had all my renders. The first 18 images are the renders in order, the 19th and 20th image are renders of the room as a whole and the 21st and 22nd image are renders illustrating the path of the plane.

Stop Motion Animation – Experimentation/College Work

We began this project by talking as a group about what Stop Motion Animation actually is. We watched videos of Stop Motion Animation on YouTube, especially, those made by PES. We discussed the different types of Stop Motion Animation and techniques used to create them.

Our Stop Motion Animations were shot using the colleges Canon 550D SLR’s. Stephan, a teacher in the media department and an experienced photographer, taught us all we needed to know about the 550D’s. From what’s inside and how it works to the various settings and how they affect the shot.

I spent a while playing around with the camera to get a feel of what the 550D was capable of and to try and feel a little more comfortable using it. Once I had got used to where certain buttons and settings where, I went ahead and tried one of my 6 initial ideas. I wanted to make a paper aeroplane and fly it around the room with the camera following close behind.
I went ahead and gave it a go, put all the shots into Premiere Pro, sped the frames per second up and made it into a quick movie. From looking back at the movie I noticed two big things which I needed to improve on. One, I needed far more shots, I had about 6 shots per second, I needed to double this to 12 shots per second. Secondly was the blur, holding the plane on the wire made it very hard to hold the plane still, which resulted in a blur in almost every shot. In order to fix this I needed to adjust the settings so that the shutter in the camera was open for a much shorter amount of time.

In order to get 12 frames per second smoothly, I needed the plane to move the same amount for each frame. So I went ahead and designed a rig. I started off by marking a circular path around the room. I focused on shooting one quarter of the circular path to begin with. This quarter measured 600cm and I wanted it to last 4 seconds long. So 600/4=150cm per second, 150/12=12.5cm per frame, (12.5*48=600) which means that I will have exactly 48, 12.5cm increments in a 600cm strip.

I then moved onto my camera rig, I put the camera on a tripod and fastened the plane onto the tripod using wire. Bending the wire, I positioned the plane so that it was right in front of the camera giving the perfect shot every time. I used the front leg of the tripod as my guide to place on the marks I put every 12.5cm on the strip of tape on the floor. I put a strip of tape across the two back legs and marked a halfway point so that I could align the back of the tripod with the tape on the floor using the mark between the two back legs of the tripod as reference and lining it up.

So I shot all 48 pictures put them into Premier Pro set the speed to 12 frames per second, (12/48=4seconds) and made it into a quick movie. I had got rid of the blur problem and the choppy play back problem and the movie looked nice and clean. But it was missing the fun of the first animation. I was restricted to using the same height due to the design of the rig, I couldn’t lean the camera left or right or pan in or out. All these missing effects made the movie look very boring, robotic and it didn’t flow very nicely. I needed to combine the two ways I shot the stop motion to get the perfect balance. My next step is going to be to fix the shutter speed so that there is no blur, I will attach the plane to the camera itself so I don’t have to sue a tripod. I will be taking much more shots to get closer to 12 frames per second. By doing this I will be able to move around the room more freely, and different heights and angles.

Doing the work with the plane lead me onto another stop motion animation idea. Using the long line of macs at college, I could place a different interesting background on each mac. For example, a huge mountain on one, a storm on another, a forest on another one, etc. I would then get a small model plane and take pictures of it cruising along the screens, as if its flying between locations. I went ahead with my idea and began with finding suitable HD images (that matched the resolution of the macs.) This would only be a test run to see what difficulties I would get into so I found 6 or 7 images and used them on 7 macs.

I got all the images full screened on each mac, got myself a 550D and a tripod. I didn’t have a toy plane at the time, so I looked around on Google images and found a nice looking rotary engine plane, printed it off and cut it out. The whole idea in itself was quite abstract and funky so I went and attached the plane, using string, to a piece of wire. This gave me control over the planes movement, for example, I could move the plane in an upwards motion by moving the right strong higher than the left.

I placed my camera and tripod on a wheelie chair and got a friend to hold the plane rig for me. I wanted a general idea of what it would look like so I started off by doing a video of the idea, not a stop motion animation. After a few attempts we got a decent clip without the wheelie chair going off course or the plane getting tangled. I put the movie into Premiere Pro and rendered it, the into After Effects to add some colour correction and fine tuning. The end result looked visually very interesting and came out good, but there was a few problems. The camera was too jolty and not strait enough and it was too zoomed in, you couldn’t really see that the images where on the macs, which was one of the most interesting aspects of the idea. On my next attempt I will try to use a better rig to move the camera smoothly and pan the camera further out so that you can see the macs and bring the animation to life. I will also shoot the animation in stop motion, not film, now that I know what I’m working with and have a better understanding of what the stop motion animation will look like when its complete.

Since these two ideas I have come up with another 4, 6 in total:

1) Plane flying around room

2) Plane flying in front of various macs

3) Pair of shoes walking about, dancing, tripping over etc.

4) Clothes flying out of a wardrobe and dressing themselves over an invisible person.

5) Piece of string slithering slithering around objects.

6) Pieces of wire bending themselves around to form various shapes. I will story board these ideas and choose a final one to make into my final stop motion animation.

I will put all of these ideas into story boards, and now that I have had some experience with Stop Motion Animation, I will be able to chose a final more confidently.

Stop Motion Animation Project

My new college project is a Stop Motion Animation. We need to write a Report on Stop Motion Animation & our process throughout the project. We also need to create 6 storyboards as ideas from which 1 will be chosen to make into the final Stop Motion Animation. The first thing I did was research on Stop Motion Animation and the different types there are to choose from. From my research I wrote my report.

 

Stop Motion Animation Research Report

Stop motion animation has a long history in film. It was often used to show objects moving as if by magic. The first stop motion technique was created by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton for The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1897), in which a toy circus of acrobats and animals comes to life. One of the earliest clay animation films was Modelling Extraordinary, which dazzled audiences in 1912. December 1916 brought the first of Willie Hopkins’ 54 episodes of “Miracles in Mud” to the big screen. Also in December 1916, the first woman animator, Helena Smith Dayton, began experimenting with clay stop motion. She released her first film in 1917, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

In animation stop motion animation is a cinematic process, or technique used to makes static objects appear as if they were moving. This technique is commonly used in claymation and puppet-based animation. The objects are brought to life by breaking up the figure’s motion into increments and filming one frame per increment.

There are many different types of stop motion animation:

Clay (strata out):

Clay animation or claymation is one of many forms of stop motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is “deformable”—made of a malleable substance, usually Plasticine clay.

(Strata-cut animation is most commonly a form of clay animation in which a long bread-like “loaf” of clay, internally packed tight and loaded with varying imagery, is sliced into thin sheets, with the animation camera taking a frame of the end of the loaf for each cut, eventually revealing the movement of the internal images within.)

Cutout (silhouette):

Cutout animation is a technique for producing animations using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or even photographs.

(Silhouette animation is animation in which the characters are only visible as black silhouettes. This is usually accomplished by backlighting articulated cardboard cut-outs.)

Graphic:

Graphic animation is the animation of photographs (in whole or in parts) and other non-drawn flat visual graphic material, such as newspaper and magazine clippings.

Model (go motion):

Model animation is a form of stop motion animation designed to merge with live action footage to create the illusion of a real-world fantasy sequence.

(Go motion is  moving the animated model slightly during the exposure of each film frame, producing a realistic motion blur. The main difference is that while the frames in stop motion are made up by images of stills taken between the small movements of the object, the frames in go motion are images of the object taken while it is moving.)

Object:

Object animation is a form of stop motion animation that involves the animated movements of any non-drawn objects such as toys, blocks, dolls, etc. which are not fully malleable, such as clay or wax, and not designed to look like a recognizable human or animal character.

Pixilation:

Pixilation (from pixilated) is a stop motion technique where live actors are used as a frame-by-frame subject in an animated film, by repeatedly posing while one or more frame is taken and changing pose slightly before the next frame or frames. The actor becomes a kind of living stop motion puppet.

Puppetoon:

In puppetoon animation the puppets are rigid and static pieces; each is typically used in a single frame and then switched with a separate, near-duplicate puppet for the next frame. Thus puppetoon animation requires many separate figures. It is thus more analogous in a certain sense to cel animation than is traditional stop-motion: the characters are created from scratch for each frame (though in cel animation the creation process is simpler since the characters are drawn and painted, not sculpted).