Stop Motion

Free software to use for stop motion animation

1. SAM Animation from http://www.samanimation.com/ (Easy to use for younger kids)

2. Anasazi Stop Motion Animator from http://www.animateclay.com/anasazi/smafull.exe

3. StopMoJo from http://www.mondobeyondo.com/projects/stopmojo/ (Cross Platform, inc Linux)

How To Guides

SAM Animation

http://www.samanimation.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13&Itemid=18

Anasazi

http://www.animateclay.com/index.php?module=Pages&func=display&pageid=24

Making Models

You can use a wide range of materials or objects to create your models.

Childrens toys: bendy figurines, soft toys, cars, legos etc
Magnetic figures, or magnetic shapes etc
Cardboard, coloured paper
Felt
Coloured grains of sand or other fine materials
Plasticine, playdough, clay (Hint: mixing plasticine 50:50 with BluTak is very effective)
Whiteboard and markers
Pencil and paper

Keep your models simple and bold. Make sure the features you are animating are big.

Depending on what you are using (eg paper, sand etc), sometimes it is easiest to keep your scene flat and mount your webcam on a stand above the scene looking straight down.

Plan your Story

Create a storyboard showing the main events that are going to happen.

Work out how many frames you will need to capture. A frame rate of 15 fps is usually good for stop motion. If you want to make a 10 sec movie clip, you will need to grab 10 x 15 = 150 frames.

Work out how many frames each section needs to be.

Capture Your Animation

Start grabbing frames. Take a few shots of the scene before you start anything moving.
Each frame is only one fifteenth of a second so you may want to grab a few frames of some positions in order to avoid the movement looking too fast.
Keep movements small.
Before you click Grab, make sure your hands are out of shot and be aware of changes in the lighting conditions between each grab.
Take about 10 shots to end the scene.

It's useful to have two people working together to grab your animation. One to take the captures, the other to move the model.
The Onion Skinning tool (in the bottom left hand corner in Anasazi), is useful as it enables you to see the position of your model in the last frame you grabbed. Don't leave it on all the time as it can cause the program to crash. SAM Animator has automatic onion skinning.
It's a good idea to click Done after about 50 frames or so to avoid losing work if something goes wrong or the program does crash. Save them in a folder and name them sequentially so that you know in what order to put them back together again. eg clip01, clip02 etc.

Editing your Movie

In SAM Animation you have quite a good set of tools for editing the movie and adding in audio. If using Anasazi it is better to edit in something like Movie Maker.

Save your final captures as .avi files ready for import into Movie Maker or other video editing software.