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.
Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond of NOTsoNOISY created this amazing stop-motion animation titled "Animated Tower." He found students and staff volunteers to turn an 11-story-building at the University of Health Sciences (HESAV) in Switzerland into a giant 10 by 11 display, with each window serving as a single pixel.
Animator Antonio Vicentini created this short and sweet animation using …
Luminaris is an amazing stop-motion short film by Argentinean director Juan Pablo Zaramella.
Next Media Animation is a Taiwanese company that regularly creates animations that report …
New York-based animator Adam Pesapane (who goes by the working name PES) creates some of the smoothest and most creative stop-motion videos we've seen. In the short video above, titled "Fresh Guacamole", he shows how you can create a guacamole dip out of random objects such as baseballs, golf balls, and dice.
Want to inform someone of their right to take pictures in the US? Just share this short cartoon created …
The New York Public Library has a massive collection of over 40,000 vintage stereographs (two photos taken from slightly different points of view). To properly share them with the world in 3D, the library has launched a new tool called the Stereogranimator. It lets you convert an old stereograph into either an animated 3D GIF (which uses "wiggle stereoscopy") or an anaglyph (the kind that requires special glasses).
A clever little stop-motion video that shows what baking would be like if you could do it in Photoshop.
Art director Sean Ohlenkamp, his wife Lisa, and an army of volunteers spent …