Lately we had a presentation on how many different types of stop motion animation there are and I've decided to talk about a few of them... some of them are well known and some of them I've never heard of but are worth looking at!
Stop motion animation is created by physically moving the objects around you then photographing them frame by frame. Sounds easy enough but really, it isn't. You have to make sure you're only moving the piece that's supposed to be moved because you can ruin the composition.
Cutout is probably the most common one. It's really time consuming but can be really effective!
It's a technique where you create cutouts usually from paper but you could easily do it with other materials. and create compositions from that.
South Park actually started as a paper cut out.
The creators later on started using Maya to actually create the episodes, probably mostly because it's more time efficient. Even though they started using a 3D software they kept it looking 2D and the limited movement of everything so it still looks like paper cutouts. Also I like the fact that the shadow still makes it look like it's a paper composition, that's laid on top of each other.
Another technique is called Pixilation.
It's a pretty similar technique but instead of moving paper cutouts around, it's people etc.
This is the animation that we saw during the presentation and I really wanted to talk about it because I couldn't get over it. I can only imagine how tiring it was to do this because of all the jumping! Also it looks like it's been shot all in one day cause of the weather and lighting not changing much but it looks like it took quite a long time to do, so here I'm not sure if it just didn't actually take them that long to shoot it, or they had a bad weather for a long time. Overall it was weird, but funny weird, I personally loved how the legs of the actors seemed like they're flapping around. I think the imperfection of this made it so funny.
The stop motion technique that impressed me the most is a type of claymation. It's called strata cut and it looks like this:
It's because you have to put it all together at once, and you're not entirely sure what it's going to look like when you cut it up is what makes it difficult. But basically, how it's done is you put your pieces together, you have to know what moves when and measure it right because you won't have a second chance at this, and then cut it off bit by bit, and photograph it each time. I think it's the difficulty and the amount of accurate measurements and thinking that goes into this process is what makes it so impressive.
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