How to Make Stop-Motion Videos

Stop-motion video is a simple animation technique that has been around almost as long as motion pictures themselves. All video relies on a series of still images being played back fast enough to give the illusion of adding motion. Still, most video captures the actual motion of animate objects. Stop-motion video relies on inanimate objects, such as toys or clay figures, that are moved by an animator between each frame and photographed. The first known commercial stop-motion film was made in 1898. It was called The Humpty Dumpty Circus and was produced by animating a toy circus. It’s suspected that the technique was used before that in DIY animations by hobbyists that didn’t have commercial releases.From the 1950s and up until 1981’s Clash of the Titans, the technique was also mixed with live-action footage as a precursor to what is now accomplished almost entirely with CGI. Perhaps the most famous examples of stop-motion animation are the children’s shows produced with clay figures. Known colloquially as claymation, these shows include Gumby and several holiday-themed specials. Several major motion pictures were made with the technique in the 1990s, such as The Nightmare Before Christmas, Chicken Run, and James and the Giant Peach.Because of the amount of work involved, this alternative way to animate video often has a much lower frame rate than a typical video would have, giving it a distinctive look that has become part of the appeal.

Making these types of videos used to require special equipment if you wanted results that rival what the professionals do. With modern video-editing equipment, it is easy to import pictures taken from any digital camera and sequence them into a video. This means that high-quality stop-motion animations can be made even with the phone in your pocket. You can find many detailed stop-motion tutorials online that will cover every aspect of stop-motion film-making, but this post will show you the basics of how to make a stop-motion animation so you can get started quickly. Despite being a quick overview, we’ll still cover every aspect of the process in this how-to. Stop-motion animation production starts before you’ve even picked up the camera or got your props ready. Let’s take a look at how to create a storyboard to prepare for your stop-motion film-making journey.

Making animation pictures is not the same thing as snapping some photos for your Instagram. A great deal of care must be taken to ensure that each image is as similar as possible to the one before it, except for whatever movement has been added to the scene. To make a convincing animation, the viewer needs to believe that the frames were captured within a fraction of a second from one another. Any deviation in the camera will create unnatural movement or focus. Your stopmotion maker likely has some tools to help with color grading that can fix minor mistakes, but those will never be perfect, and they will be very time-consuming if all of your frames need to be fixed. Therefore, it is crucial to carefully set up your camera and capture the shots correctly to save yourself headaches later on.The first step to ensuring good, consistent shots is to use a tripod. You should try to use one of the heavier, more sturdy tripods for this task. Smaller ones may be great for getting a still one-off shot, but their light weight makes it easy for minor movements to occur. Those movements will make your animation look jerky and unprofessional. The longer you expect your shot to take, the more true this is. Your tripod could potentially have to sit undisturbed for hours or even days.Similarly, you should set your focus to manual. Ideally, you will focus it on a central location in the scene and not have to worry about it again. For complex shots, where the character in frame needs to move forward or backward, you may need to adjust the focus of each frame. Such shots are usually avoided when making stop-motion animation for this very reason.

Once the camera is properly set up for stop-motion photography, you’ll need to take the pictures themselves. It will likely take you some practice to figure out how much you need to move the props each frame in order to capture the animation you want. Major keyframes should be timed. You should know ahead of time, for example, that you want your character to take half a second to raise his hand. By dividing this number by the number of frames per second you are aiming for, you’ll know how many shots you need to get of each step in the motion. This alone is a big help in deciding how much to move the characters.The consistency issues you faced when setting up the camera extend to actually taking the shots as well. Even the slightest movement, such as pressing down the shutter button, can cause unwanted motion in the camera that carries over to the animation. If your camera has a remote control feature, this can be a convenient way of getting the shot without any risk of unwanted motion. You also have to work to ensure that the lighting is consistent between shots. This means leaving whatever lighting setup you have in place alone during the duration of the scene. Because the color temperature of regular light bulbs can vary over time, it’s also a good idea to use lights that are designed for photography.

Using a stop-motion editor dramatically simplifies the process of making excellent stop-motion animation. The tool will make it easy to keep your frame rates consistent and provide you with an array of effects, transitions, and titling options, so your finished product has more in common with the big-budget stop-motion films of the 1990s than the early attempts from the nascent days of the technology. You will also be able to import your photos from whatever format they are in quickly and export them to the most common video formats, so you spend less time struggling to make the technology work and more time editing your animation.Here’s how to use Movavi Video Editor as a stop-motion editor.