My (uncompleted) Journey As a Stop Motion Animator
From late August of 2016 onwards, I have been a big fan of stop motion animation. Beginning in late 2016, I began to create some of my own stop motion videos, being influenced by the huge YouTubers of the day such as MICHAELHICKOXFILMS and Annoying Noise Productions. However, when I first started, I was not very good at stop motion. My first ever stop motion video is below:
Ok, for those of you who don’t know what stop motion animation animation is, it’s a version of animation that involves lots of taking pictures. The way it works is you move an object once every time before you take a picture, and when you add all of these pictures together, the object seems to be moving on its own. Still not getting it? Picture a notebook: If you draw a stick figure on each page of the flipbook and move the stick figure a tiny bit every page, when you flip the notebook the stick figure appears to move on its own as the pages quickly blend together. That’s the same idea with stop motion, but with pictures. Once you’ve got the basic technique of stop motion down, there are many different rules that must apply to your animation to make it look more lifelike — however we will get to that later. When I first started stop motion, all I had to work with was a ipod, some plastic army men, and small brick blocks. Using this to the best of my ability.
However, as learned how to be more skillfull with the art, I began to use other items such as legos, clay, and more. Here are some videos below of me working in the first few months — my animation is starting to improve, however it does still not look too fluent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONSwgXkYlBA
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Then, I discovered a better way to shoot pictures, using a DSLR camera. While before I had used an Ipod with a free software called stop motion studio, I now had the ability to shoot with a Canon t3i — a camera that could render much higher quality pictures. With the introduction of this though I had to come up witha software that could be used with the Canon camera to do stop motion — and that’s when I discovered DragonFrame. DragonFrame was an incredible software that top notch animators use, and I intended to try and use it. However, it was quite costly for an someone like me, so I practiced using the free trial (hence the watermark) with the canon camera I now possesed:
With my animation still improving, I eventually acquired DragonFrame and began to use it. My first videos were not very good, however they began to improve:
Now, we can jump to the present where I am today. My newer videos are WAY better than my first ones, however they still have a long way to go:
The one thing I have to say after my 3 years of animating is this: stay motivated. This life goal is neccassary for all professions. Oftentimes if you give up, you will never reach your goal. However, if you stay motivated, you will eventually rise to the top. It all matters how much time you put into it… The more time put in means the more results you will get out of it. All you need to do it practice.
