Trying Stop Motion for the First Time

I've always wanted to try a stop motion the things people create are amazing and I especially love when people use everyday items that come to life like this Creator I found recently on YouTube who uses action figures to make his animations and they are the inspiration for the style of stop motion that I want to try out but I've always wondered how much work does it actually take to create a short stop-motion scene is it as hard as they make it sound in movies and TV I feel like it's always portrayed as someone spending months and months working on something only to get a few seconds of Animation from or will this be something that anyone can attempt in a shorter amount of time now I'm going to challenge myself to complete three levels of stop-motion each level will get higher in frame rate and I'll also be challenging myself with more Dynamic animations and using everything I've learned from the previous levels to make each new level better hopefully I just showed some examples of what those three levels look like but those are not the final scenes those are just there to visualize the frame rate and feel of each level assuming I can create them so let's jump right into level one with only 8 frames per second to work with I knew getting super fluid movement wasn't going to be very easy so I decided to tell the story of an action figure trying to figure out his new animated form since this is also a story about me getting my bearings on stop motion now for the action figure I got this Mandalorian for all of the scenes mainly because he had the most joints I could find for a good price on Amazon I also got two soldering kits from Harbor Freight that I tore apart to make this rig that can attach to the figure and lastly I got some mounting putty to just keep everything in place after a lot of trial and error I had all of the photos taken for level one and it was off to post processing but here is what they don't tell you about stop motion I had all of the pictures done pretty quickly and I was feeling pretty good but this rig shows up in almost every single frame it means adjusting a bunch of keyframes and masks and sometimes even manually painting out things one frame at a time so the editing process takes way longer than the actual shoot now I could have just left the rig in if I was doing claymation it wouldn't have a rig or some characters have their own rig built internally but I wanted it to be polished anyway I eventually finished so let's take a look at level one hmm obviously there are some flaws and the animation is a little rough at times but I left it as is so we could see my progress over time and I applied all of my learnings to level two in level two Mando has gotten a little bit more confident and so have I my biggest takeaways from the first level were around the software I was using and the character movement the software I used was called stop motion studio and I used the pro version which was great for its price I originally felt like there were no decent budget options but for being around ten dollars it allowed for a ton of functionality and it seems like a great starting point if you want to try out stop motion so after the first scene I felt like a lot of my animations were kind of playing back at a weird speed so this time around I really trusted the software to play back the preview exactly like it was going to be when I exported it that allowed me to make more realistic movements so that it didn't feel like gravity was off or that things were moving too fast or too slow to times before I talk about the second takeaway I just have to show you how level two turned out first I had so much fun making this one with both level 1 and level two I was kind of creating the story as I was going which probably isn't the best way of doing it but you have a lot of time to just sit and take photos to just think creatively about how I wanted the story to evolve and I was just really happy with how this turned out in terms of the second thing I learned it was to really focus on momentum and maintaining movement in moments like when Manda lands on the Rubik's Cube or when he stops sliding I made sure to add extra dynamics of carrying through that motion to make sure it felt more realistic plus I really like this puff of smoke that I added I used cotton balls for all of the smoke effects since I wanted to do all of those effects in camera I had learned so much up to this point but now it was time to apply everything I learned to the final level with each level I was learning something new and level two was no different I had two big takeaways one be very careful when moving the character if you knock it over or move anything too far it's really hard to position things back to exactly where they were supposed to be because of that this time I made sure to plant both of his feet firmly on the ground using a lot of putty and I also clamped down the rig to the desk for the entire shoot so that there was no unexpected movement the second takeaway was don't bump the camera I had accidentally done that in both of the previous scenes and it made editing incredibly hard because the frames just always looked off because of that I decided to power through a 12 hour day of stop motion because I didn't want to risk shooting over multiple days and bumping anything now this one ended up being by far the longest at 390 images so editing took forever I'll spray you watching through all of this and I'll speed it up like crazy but for some reason at the time I felt like I needed to record all of it but I finished and I forgot to tell you one other thing about the type of scene I did it was a dance if you couldn't already tell because I showed you a bunch of time lapses for this one not only did I have to make it look like a dance but I wouldn't really know until the entire thing was done if it would work with music let's see if it turned out [Music] so just like in the animation I was exhausted by the end of this but it worked the dancing was short but I'm so happy with how it turned out and it lined up with music it's definitely not perfect but for being my first time trying out 24 frames per second I'm really happy with it I can't tell you how hard it was to work on just a couple movements to see how all of that work would turn into just one second of Animation but when you put enough of that together apparently you can make a movie that blows my mind well I did it my first time doing stop motion three levels of challenges and the Mandalorian was here with me with me through it all make sure to hit the like button if you enjoyed and I will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Sam Beige

Views: 1,908,599

Keywords: stop motion, animation, art, mandalorian, Star Wars

Id: OildfgTeuM8

Length: 8min 10sec (490 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 14 2022