If you have ever seen Wallace and Gromit or if you are one of the baby boomers and have seen Gumby and Pokey than you have witnesses stop motion animation. This filming technique used primarily clay character whose individual moves and expression are filmed individually to create a serious of pictures. The pictures are shown in sequence sort of like a flip-book thus creating animation. Stop Motion in the right hands can bee quite spectacular and with the right storyline quite engaging. One of the most recent movies to feature stop motion animation is Coraline which is based on a German novel. Coraline is one of the most sophisticated stop motion animation films ever produced. It was shown in 3D and was critically acclaimed. It won several important awards and has grossed close to $200 million dollars worldwide.
Creating your own stop motion animation is actually quite simply. All you need for the photography portion is a USB camera, digital camera or a digital SLR. You of course will need some software and there are many available including several free one. You can do a search on Google for “stop motion animation software” and come up with quite a few. You will also need character or figurines. One of the most popular type of characters to use is Lego characters. As a matter of fact a whole genre of stop animation movie made with Lego characters has been created. They are called brick films. Some are very good, however the majority simply are bad.
Once you have you set-up complete all you have to do is animate you character one movement at a time and capture each movement with a photo. That is the most basic form of stop motion animation. The cool thing about stop motion animation is that it is not just for adults. Kids of all ages can easily learn this filming technique which allows them to be very creative.
