Stop Motion Animation
When I was a kid, I loved stop motion animation. My favorite, of course, was clay animation. A lot of kids love cartoons more than anything else, but for me claymation took the cake. There was nothing quite like it. It really made bizarre and fascinating characters come to life in a way that cartoon animation never could for me. Naturally, I wanted to try my hand at it.
Last week, I finally got a chance to. Like most would-be stop motion animators, however, I immediately discovered that it is more difficult than I had expected. Anyone who tells you that stop motion animation doesn’t involve a lot of hard work is totally fooling themselves. Every frame has to be individually rendered. That means that you have to reform your clay piece, click the shutter, reform it again, click the shutter again, and so on. A lot of stop motion animators make high-speed films, but even for a budget project, you need at least 10 frames a second to create a pretty realistic look.
Fortunately, there are some good tricks for stop motion animated films. One of the most useful things I have found is using armatures. The problem that most people run into in stop motion animation is that after a few bends, clay figures tend to get disfigured. Their shapes change, their bodies get smudged, and all in all they go through a progressive decline. Using armatures under the surface is a great way to limit this. An armature is like a skeleton for a clay figure. It keeps the body in shape, allowing you to more easily pose and manipulate it without damaging it quite as much. It still takes a lot of careful work to do stop motion animations, but it certainly makes it easier.
Another good tip for stop motion animation is to start simple. I know it sounds obvious, but you might not know what simple means going into the first project. I thought that a five-minute stop motion animation film involving only four characters was a simple enough project, but it turned out to be overwhelming. If you are doing your first project, aim for about 20 to 30 seconds and use one character or two at the most. Once you get that out of the way, you can take on more ambitious works. You will be able to work your way up to full length stop motion animations if you really want to, but you have to do it one step at a time.