Basics of Stop Motion Animation

Series Summary

Stop-motion has been used as a method of film making since the dawn of the celluloid age. 1898’s The Humpty Dumpty Circus used the technique to bring to life a toy circus of performers and animals. Audiences were captivated by these magical moving images, and as stop-motion animation became more popular filmmakers began using clay modeling and puppets to tell their stories. The technique was also very popular in the avant-garde art circles of the 20s and 30s, which produced surrealist film like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou. Now in the age of CGI and digital animation, stop-motion techniques are still widely used, and films like Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas and the Wallace & Gromit series continue to delight moviegoers with their dazzling effects.

In this series of free video clips you’ll learn the basics of stop-motion animation. Expert animation artist Blake Whitaker shows you what supplies you’ll need to get started, offers tips on creating characters and backgrounds, and demonstrates how to properly connect the video equipment and use Stop Motion Pro and Adobe Premiere software to bring your animation to life.

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Blake Whitaker for Expert Village. Today I am going to talk about a stop motion animation. Stop motion is generic term for moving ecstatic object frame by frame and playing it back fast to create the illusion of motion. Stop motion has been around for a long time. We've seen it back in the day with King Kong in the 1930's and we've seen it recently with the corpses bride in Robo Chicken. It is easy animation to do and with a few simple supplies, anyone at home can do it. Today I am going to show you how to gather those supplies and make yourself a movie. The first thing you need to think about is what your animated and why you are animated. So it would be a good idea to write yourself a script or outline or story board essentially all being sort of the same thing. This is pre-production before you even start gathering your supplies or animated it all, you want to have a clear idea of why and what you are doing. Once you have your script ready and you know what you want to animate, it is time to go find your characters that are going to be in your movie and the set you are going to animate on and then the rest of the supplies will go along with it, so let's go. "