animation

Snapchat just upped the ante on acid trip-like augmented reality. In their latest update, the photo and video messaging app added something called 'World Lenses': basically animated filters that you can apply to the world around you the same way you could apply the app's 'Selfie Lenses' to your face.

Stop-motion photography has come a long way since the early 1900s, but it still involves creating an animation one frame at a time by introducing slight changes and movements between still photos. To see how far we've come with the technique, check out this 3-minute video, titled "The Evolution of Stop-Motion."

Animator Drew Christie of Whidbey Island, Washington, was recently commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to create a set of animated short films that tell the story of famous photography pioneers.

Nikon recently gave filmmakers Wriggles & Robins the new Nikon D810 and asked the duo to showcase the low-light capabilities of the DSLR. They decided to shoot a stop motion animation in the dark outdoors.

"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.