San Francisco-based indie band Wildlife Control made this creative music video for their song “Analog or Digital” using both time-lapes and stop-motion techniques. They spent a day on at Ocean Beach in SF, shooting the entire video in one take as a series of 3,060 individual photographs. The fast playback makes the world around them pass in time-lapse, while their synchronized movements cause them to move around like stop-motion claymation figures. It’s definitely not an easy feat — they had to play the song slowed down 35x!
A clever little stop-motion video that shows what baking would be like if you could do it in Photoshop. Unlike with photos, it’d probably be wise to steer clear of the Burn Tool.
Art director Sean Ohlenkamp, his wife Lisa, and an army of volunteers spent many sleepless nights at Type Books in Toronto, Canada moving, stacking, and photographing books. The result was this beautiful stop-motion video showing books coming to life at night.
Here’s a simple yet brilliant stop-motion video showing a person sitting at a table plays with shapes. Instead of computer-trickery, cleverly captured still photographs were used to bring the simple materials to life. It was created by animator Steven Briand while he was doing a two-month internship at Partizan.
Address Is Approximate is a beautiful and creative stop-motion video by Tom Jenkins of Theory Films. Here’s the one-sentence synopsis:
A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View.
No CGI was used — all the animation you see in the video was done by hand and captured on a still photograph using a Canon 5D Mark II!
Here’s another cool example of what’s possible when you combine creativity with an insane amount of dedication: animator Jonathan Chong spent hundreds of hours creating this stop motion video for the song “Against The Grain” by the Australian band Hudson. He animated everything by hand, and captured 5125 individual photographs of 920 pencils for the three-minute long finished product. Read more…
Want to see what pure dedication looks like? This music video for the song “In Your Arms” by Kina Grannis is a stop-motion animation done with a background composed of jelly beans. It’s a crazy project that required 22 months, 1,357 hours, 30 people, and 288,000 jelly beans. They could have used CGI, of course, but each frame was carefully created by hand and photographed with a still camera. It’s even more mind-blowing given this fact: none of it was done with a green screen. Read more…
Australian college student Nathan Grant created this stop-motion music video for the song ‘Minister’s Daughter’ by the band The Good God Damned. After recording footage of the band playing using a Sony XDCAM, Grant printed out 3,433 photographs from stills in the video. He then spent six months turning the prints into this stop-motion video, capturing the new photographs with a Canon 600D.
Here’s an interesting factoid: to make the Star Wars scenes containing AT-AT walkers and tauntauns more realistic, a new stop motion technique called “go motion” was created:
Stop motion animation can create a disorienting, and distinctive, staccato effect, because the animated object is perfectly sharp in every frame, since each frame of the animation was actually shot when the object was perfectly still. Real moving objects in similar scenes of the same movie will have motion blur, because they moved while the shutter of the camera was open.
Go motion was designed to prevent this, by moving the animated model slightly during the exposure of each film frame, producing a realistic motion blur. The main difference is that while the frames in stop motion are made up by images of stills taken between the small movements of the object, the frames in go motion are images of the object taken while it is moving.
So how did they go about adding motion blur to still photographs of inanimate objects? Well, their methods included smearing vaseline on the camera lens and bumping the puppet or table while the exposure was being made.
