animation

"Lost Property" is a wonderful 5-minute animated short film by freelance animator Asa Lucander of Bristol, UK.

For his master thesis project at Hochschule Mannheim in Germany, photographer and communication designer Andreas Neumann decided to create bullet time animations using analog photography. He ended up creating a camera ring composed of 100 individual pinhole cameras for the project, titled Orbita 13.

If you've ever photographed spinning airplane propeller or helicopter rotor blades with your smartphone, you may have found that the spinning blades were turned into bizarre shapes in the resulting photo. What you're seeing is distortion caused by a rolling shutter, when a CMOS sensor captures a scene by scanning across it very quickly rather than capturing the entire frame at once.

NASA’s New Horizons probe shot a number of close-up photos of Pluto during the first every flyby …

Want to see how CMOS and CCD image sensors work and how they differ from each other? Photographer and animator Raymond Sirí created a couple of simple animations showing the basic idea of how these two sensor technologies go about capturing light, reading it, and storing the information.

The animation above showing CMOS sensor tech was used in a trial against Canon, Sirí says.

Artist Anton Hecht recently created an unusual stop motion film using photos of a giant life-sized mannequin. Instead of doing the animation themselves, the team invited random strangers who were walking by to help move the dummy around in the public square. The video above is what resulted from their help under careful direction.

Photographer Carl Pendle created this clever stop-motion titled "The Cut" that offers an interesting perspective into different fruits and vegetables.

"Photographs" is a touching 6-minute-long animated short film about an elderly woman who comes across an old (but working) Polaroid camera. She begins snapping instant photo selfies and uses those images to relive her younger days.

Light painting photographer Darren Pearson spent the past year working on the stop motion animation above, titled "Lightspeed." Each of the 1,000 frames in it is a separate light-painted photograph that was captured in various locations across California.

Want to know how much work goes into an old fashioned stop motion animation movie? The short clip above will show you. It's a short extra scene that appeared during the end credits of the 2014 film "The Boxtrolls."

The shot starts out looking like a normal scene from the film. However, the camera starts zooming out, turning the clip into a creative behind-the-scenes time-lapse that shows how it was made.

If it wasn't for the very short behind the scenes video we've embedded below, we would have a hard time believing that the animation above really was just an incredibly intricate mix of stop-motion and long-exposure lighting effects -- it's beyond impressive.

Traditional 3D motion capture technologies, amazing though they are, are limited. They only give you a small number of data points to work with, and while they seem to capture a great deal of detail, their abilities are far outpaced by the intricate movements of the human body.

Fortunately, there’s a new technology in development that might just be able to solve this problem by throwing a crap-load of cameras at it.

If you enjoyed the sanding stop-motion video we featured this past week, this creation is going to be right up your alley.

Called Waves of Grain, this experimental short film by Keith Skretch follows the mesmerizing patterns created by the grain in a block of wood as it's slowly stripped away layer-by-layer using a planer.

In Verschleif, the stop-motion video you see above, artist Laurin Döpfner decided to take a number of seemingly everyday objects and bring them to life in a strange, unique and entrancing way.

Using an industrial sanding machine (likely a belt-sander of sorts), Döpfner broke down a number of objects a single layer at a time, producing the surreal stop-motion video above in the process.

What you see in the video above is a real sculpture that does, in fact, look as if it is perpetually melting right before your eyes. But while creating the exact sculpture took months of design and engineering work, the photographic technique behind it was invented as long ago as 100 BC.

What you're looking at is a three-dimensional "zoetrope," an animation device that created the illusion of motion using lighting effects or a sequence of still images (in this case, it's a mix of clever sculpting and well-timed strobes).

Maybe you're sick of the "cartoonist/photographer/artist inserts fun characters or images into the real world using forced perspective" thing, and admittedly there have been a lot, but the video above is an example that falls very near the top of the genre's "best of" list.

We try to stay away from sharing video-specific content on PetaPixel because we consider ourselves photo people through and through. And yet, overlap is bound to happen, which is why we couldn't resist sharing this insightful and artfully crafted animation that pays homage to the work of editors.

Titled "Bears on Stairs," this unbelievably smooth stop motion animation of 3D printed pieces was created by DBLG, a creative agency based out of London.

Created by Netherland-based director and animator Andre Maat, this incredible little stop-motion animated film, dubbed WOODOO, was created with the help of a whole lot of laser-cut wood pieces.

It's been a while since we've shared a stop-motion film, but 'A Girl Named Elastika' by French filmmaker Guillaume Blanchet was a no-brainer. At once simple (equipment wise) and incredibly complex (how long did it take to move all those thumbtacks!?) the video is impressive from start to finish.

If you've followed PetaPixel for a while, or even if you just keep up with popular photo news, the image above probably looks familiar. Created by photographer Fong Qi Wei, it looks like it's a part of his very successful series Time is a Dimension, which we featured back in August of last year.

But this isn't part of that series, it's actually one of 37 images combined into a single GIF. A GIF that is part of his creative followup to TIAD called Time in Motion.

Dominic, the guy behind the popular web comic Domics, put together this humorous …

A couple of months ago, The Creators Project and post-processing guru Joe Fellows teamed up to show you how to turn stills into '2.5D' animated sequences. The tutorial was very popular on PetaPixel, but it left some with as many questions as answers, and so the duo are at it again, creating a part 2 that addresses the most common concerns.

We're not entirely sure if this is the first of its kind, but this surreal stop motion animation is definitely the first we've run into that was shot entirely on Google Glass. Yep folks, the future is here, and it's reaching into the past for its animation techniques.

If you're not familiar with the light painting photography of Darren Pearson then you're really missing out. Even if you're not a big fan of light painting, his work truly is something to behold -- whether it's his photos or the short skateboarder animation we shared with you at the beginning of the year.

But that skateboarder animation's got nothing on the video that Pearson released just a couple of days ago.

The video above is equal parts mind-blowing and unsettling. Created by filmmaker Anthony Cerniello with help from a couple of animators and a photographer, it's a timelapse-like animation that captures the process of aging in a way we've never seen before.

If you don't really think about it, it's easy to take video for granted. After all, you can pull out your cell phone and be recording video in a few seconds flat (even fewer if you have Pressy). But what if you were limited to older photographic techniques? No, we don't mean film, we mean wet plate photography.

Capturing even a 12fps animation for only a few seconds would seem an enormous task, and yet, that's exactly what director Kellam Clark and his 40-person crew -- altogether The Living Tin -- are doing. They're shooting video made entirely of collodion tintypes.

The Tadaa app for iOS is a neat camera and effects app that has managed to win itself some 3 million users since it first hit digital shelves. It's done this by offering interesting effects and features that competitors like Instagram don't -- such as a Twitter-like re-share feature and the recently added ability to blur the background.

The newest feature out of the Tadaa camp, however, comes as its own stand-alone app rather than an in-app ability. Dubbed Tadaa 3D, it'll allow you to "create breathtaking 3D illusions" using standard photos.

Photographers are intimately familiar with the myriad filters available to them through Photoshop. Nothing like the Instagram-style "filters" we've come to hear about more and more often, these have names like Grain, Diffuse, Ocean Ripple and Pinch.

And although Adobe has had to deal with some negative reactions to its business model as of late, Barcelona based audiovisual studio Device decided to pay tribute to the company's filtering abilities by putting together this short animated tribute to all of Photoshop CS5's filters.

Perhaps best described as mesmerizing, Turkish photographer and artist Erdal Inci has created an interesting set of animated loops in GIF form that has the web abuzz.

The effects, which are done by cloning sections of footage of a moving subject within a static setting, provide for hypnotic never-ending animations in rather banal locations.

The video above is a creative stop-motion video that uses water drops as the "lens" through which the animation is seen. It was created without any computer-generated trickery: 2,000 individual photographs of different water drops were shot and combined to create the video.

Over the course of your comings and goings on the internet, you've probably spotted at least a few of those mind-bending GIFs that loop perspectives rather than a snippet of time.

Well, it turns out that making them yourself isn't that difficult, just as long as you have a 3D camera and some time at your disposal. And in the how-to video above, The Creators Project enlists the help of half the Mr. GIF team, Mark Portillo, to show you just how easy it is.

Stop motion animation was already being used in the late 1890's as a way to make objects in films move by "magic," but full stop-motion animated films like the ones of today didn't come to be until around 1910. When they did, one of the great pioneers of the technique was Russian photographer and entomologist Wladyslaw Starewicz.

An interesting new video-based interface technology developed in Hong Kong promises to make stop-motion animation more accessible to beginners, while making it that much easier for the pros as well.

It doesn't have an official name, but when used in combination with traditional techniques, the new interface could help take your stop-motion animation to the next level.

The idea behind stop-motion videos is pretty simple: snap a lot of photographs in rapid succession and then string together all the images afterward to animate them. There was a time when the dominant photographic processes weren't fast enough to create any meaningful kind of animation. Does that mean we'll never see a stop-motion animation created using tintypes? Nope. The video above is one example of a stop-motion video created with a super old photographic process: the dry plate tintype.

San Diego-based light-painting photographer Darren Pearson has a knack for drawing elaborate illustrations in mid-air using light. He frequently draws skeletons into his long-exposure photos, and recently created a series of photos showing a skateboarding skeleton.

Back in July, we shared a series of creative animated GIFs and a music video that show space-lapses over great distances in San Francisco. The creators Kevin Parry and Andrea Nesbitt have just published the video above that teaches how you can do the same thing with your camera.

Jordan Drake of Canadian camera shop The Camera Store just published this great hands-on field test of the Canon EOS M. Even if you don't have 10 minutes to watch the entire review, you've got to check out the two short stop-motion animations that start at about 21s and 7m50s. They're a hilarious (and accurate) sketches that poke fun at how "the Canon EOS M is a little bit late to the mirrorless party" and how the camera has a pretty shoddy autofocus system.

When his wife Osher became pregnant with their first child, photographer Tomer Grencel had the idea of documenting the pregnancy through a stop-motion video. Over the next 9 months, he snapped 1000 photographs at different points and with different creative concepts. After his daughter Emma entered the world, he spent a month combining the images into a single stop-motion animation that tells the story of Emma's journey from the womb into the world..

3D light painting can be done by using a 2D image rather than a single point of light. In the past, we've shared creative examples of iPads being used in this way to light paint everything from ghostly figures to creative animations.