Just curious if anyone here has done any stop motion animation. I plan on gettign into it once i move into my new place. I want to continue animating but I want to do it and not have to spend so much time sitting at the computer.

I've done it using my webcam and a piece of software. I remember there was some free app, I also tried stop motion pro, and dragon stop motion I think.

Something like 30+ years ago I did some with supper 8 and 16mm film. If your digital camera takes pictures and numbers them in the order you have taken them life will be much easer. Nothing complicated about it, take a picture, move things a bit, take another, move things a bit..... Just takes a lot of planning to make the movements of any thing except simple objects look right. There are a lot of tricks, most of the ones I learned came from watching the old Gumby tv show.

Yup, been there, done that - loved it!

But it can be hard on your back.

I imagine it can be hard on your back. WEll I am in the process of moving to a new home and wan tto get into that when i get there because I will have extra space. I want to get away from the PC onc ein a while too and do all those other things associated with stop motion from sculpting to making scenery etc.

Quote - I imagine it can be hard on your back. WEll I am in the process of moving to a new home and wan tto get into that when i get there because I will have extra space. I want to get away from the PC onc ein a while too and do all those other things associated with stop motion from sculpting to making scenery etc.

I know just what you mean about getting away from the PC now and then, and that's really a very necessary thing to do, or you can really hurt yourself.

I am trying to take regular little trips out - photographing, for new textures, scenic backgrounds and just nice and interesting things., partly for the exercise (I just can't keep up walking with no object, but walking to take photographs, that's different) partly so I'm not sitting at the PC exacerbating my neck injury, and partly for the photos themselves.

I loved making the scenery, props and characters for stop motion, I could quite happily have just done that without needing to go to the filming part.  But then the filming part is very satisfying too, especially when you can see the action building in front of you - but it's the leaning over and infinitesimally adjusting the positions of characters etc continuously, sometimes for hour after hour - that's the bit that does your back in.  After that you've got editing and meshing the sound to the action, for speech sometimes it's meshing the infinitesimal adjustments of characters to the sound, i.e. starting with the sound track.  The voice part anyway.

Oh I did love all that stuff.  I really envy you getting into all that.

• koff, I hope you'll have a lot of extra space? 

if your scenery making is anything like mine was, you'll need it.  I took over an entire classroom for one of mine.

 

Ah... happy days.

Well I will have more room than I have in the past but I think I soudl try to keep it small and use some digital backdrops etc to get more out of it. I do look forward to doing more practical projects and doing work I can touch and feel.

Digital backdrops?  Yes that will certainly help keep things a teansy bit smaller, however you will still need a back drop to film against - a green screen. 

I was lucky at university, as there were rooms for both filming and modeling available, and also a green cloth/ green paper. But at college there was nothing like that as they were more geared towards filming interviews with Nickolas Whitchell, radio shows, and outside documentaries.  You were allowed to do animation but you had to do the entire thing yourself including finding out how to do it (as neither of the tutors knew anything about it) and painting backbrops, making models and scenery.

I've still got the scenery, backdrop and models for that film.  I couldn't part with them, so they are stored at my Mum's, I may never use them again but I put so much work into them that I just couldn't destroy them.

And the painted backdrop is a long roll of - well more like a wide-ish careful *fold* of paper, stiff with paint and other glued on stuff.  And quite big, even just to store, and ***huge*** when opened out, almost the width of a room - well I did have to film a river bank, a cave and waterfall, a forest and various other scenery against it.

I do so envy you with such prospects ahead of you, I am in a small flat with room for me, a husband, 2 pcs and a bike - no room for scenery.

I did hope to do some oil painting at some time, and brought my box easel from Mum's for that, but there's barely room to store it packed up, goodness knows how we'd cope if I wanted to open the easel up and do some painting!

Best of luck Dann-O - and do show us what you are doing - included the various stages of modeling, I'd ***love*** to see.

Do you have an outline yet?  A script?

I've got a beginning of a script for an animation, posibly enough for a single episode, plus designs for characters, and ideas and a few test designs for scenes - but this is not stop motion:

Character designs are here:

[http://www.franontheedge.com/animation/Diary.html](http://www.franontheedge.com/animation/Diary.html "Pea Animation Characters")

Attached Link: http://www.dieselpunks.org/profiles/blogs/amazing-art-of-frank-r-paul

Yeah I have lived in apartments all my life and finally gettign a house so I will have room for it. I want to do soem stop motion because it is actually what got me into computer art and animation. I like that it is easier to get help on it too from family which is why I want to go with stop motion it will be fun to share with my daughter.

 

No outline yet I have a vague plan on bringing some classic science fition paintings to life. I love the covers from the 20's ad 30's by Frank R. Paul. Still have nto moved in and I am dealing with a dead PC so a few minor setbacks.

I like those, they have a sort of tin-plate automata look to them, not clock-punk or steam-punk exactly but a sort of Victoriana-futurism.

A dead PC!  That's quite a problem, how on earth are you managing to communicate with us?

My cousing gave me a Linux box that is sort of a trashcan special. Older computer with weak vid card but surfs the net pretty good.(1.8Ghz duron single core)  I should have my machine back up and runnign this week.

I did something one time, but don't have the project anymore. (Nothing too fancy though, just having pliers "crawl" across a desktop.) Any digital camera that takes sequentially numbered images can do it. (Which means pretty much all of 'em these days.) To avoid camera shake, having a tripod is the most important. Next is making it so that pressing the shutter button doesn't shake the camera. If your camera doesn't have shutter delay mode or a remote release, just about all cameras do have a 2s setting under the timer settings. So there's no excuse.

As for software? Any decent video editor should also be able to string sequential numbered images into video. Free software like Virtualdub even works great for this if you don't need to get fancy.

Some of the other stuff isn't as important or allows much more creative freedom. For instance you don't need much in the way of fancy lighting if you can slow the shutter speed, etc. Despite not being absolutely necessary, having a DSLR where you can set the camera to full manual may be a great step up. (Automatic cameras may do things with exposure metering or white balance that can make stop-motion flickery. It's watchable, but may not be an effect you'd want. Full manual setting makes it go away - with the caveat that you have to think more about lighting vs camera settings. Disabling autofocus also gives more control of direction.)

I'm willing to bet you have everything needed to do the basics. There's some other stuff like armatures and special puppets, but that's if you're really getting into it. (I haven't, but did read and watch videos because it's interesting.) And supposedly Dragon Stop-motion is really good software for compositing work relating to this. (I figure you can use PhotoShop even, but erasing some wires or rig from 100+ images? There's a reason why the specialized stuff was invented.)

Thanks I foudn frame grabber software and a video camera or webcam work pretty good. I have used a webcam for the quick tests i did so far i will upgrade to a digital video camera and direct feed. Monkey Jam seems pretty good so far for a open source frame grabber.

Monkey Jam?  Interesting...

Attached Link: http://www.giantscreamingrobotmonkeys.com/monkeyjam/

a link for those who are interested. Also it can get your numbered picture files to a more useable format like Divix.

That's a different way of doing it. Having another option to use video-feed or webcam data is neat too. (Provided you don't mind being tethered to a computer. As for me, I'd rather just shoot a series of pics and then upload to the computer later. SD-cards have plenty of room these days.)

Quote - a link for those who are interested. Also it can get your numbered picture files to a more useable format like Divix.

Why do you talk of Divix as a usable format? I've never heard of it. What is it?

I'd think of .mov .avi and.flv as useable formats.