stopmotion

We've seen some pretty creative music videos in the past, ranging from a microscopic time-lapse to what looked to be a Google Street View music video. The latest creative musical endeavor that has caught our eye is a video by the California group The Grouch & Eligh (or G&E for short).

Working together with Colorado-based DJ Pretty Lights, they put together a video that combines traditional time-lapse and hyper lapse with stop motion for a mind-bending 'lyric lapse' experience similar to what we saw in Marc Donahue and Sean Michael Williams' Dream Music video.

Instagram announced the ability to shoot video earlier today, but before they did, two friends embarked on a project to make the best video they could while adhering to Instagram's previous photo-only limitations. The result was a 1,600 photo stop motion video dubbed Instagrammimation that has gotten a lot of praise from viewers.

Here’s a dose of humor and creativity to put a smile on your face as we’re rounding the corner …

We've featured the work of Eric Paré, Patrick Rochon and Timecode Lab before. Using a 24 DSLR fully circular bullet time rig developed by Rochon, Paré and Timecode put together some really cool light-painting projects. One of these was LightSpin: an art project that captured dancers using an awe-inspiring combination of light painting, bullet time and stop motion.

In the past we had only a few behind the scenes details to share with you. Fortunately, Paré recently decided to release the 8 minute "documentary" above in order to explain exactly what all goes into shooting his creations.

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.

Back in 2010, Nokia created "the world's smallest stop-motion video" using its new N8 smartphone and a tiny 9mm-tall figure of a girl. If you think 9mm is tiny, try 1/25,000,000th of a inch!

Today, IBM scientists announced that they have created the world's smallest movie. Unlike the previous record holder, this one will be extremely difficult to beat. The stop-motion movie was made using individual atoms.

This experimental video shows what you get when you combine dancers, light-painting, stop-motion, and a 360-degree camera rig. It's like eye-popping popping that's the product of cameras rather than extremely skilled dancing.

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.

The above video is photographer Jonathan DeNicholas' impressive entry for the 30 Day Filming Project contest put together by Sue Bryce and announced at creativeLIVE. The contest asked entrants to submit a 2 minute video in which you captured something that made you smile every day for a month, and DeNicholas entry was one of the 6 winners (of over 100 submitted) that were then showcased on You Can't Be Serious.

To promote the Brooklyn Brewery Mash, filmmakers Landon Van Soest and Paul Trillo put together the impressive stop motion creation you see above. The video, which was created by putting together 3,000 separate stills, takes viewers on a tour of Brooklyn by bike messenger (among other things) showing off some of the borough's highlights.

Photographer and director Greg Jardin made this creative music video for the song "New York City" by Joey Ramone. It's a stop-motion video that features 115 people (some of them random pedestrians yanked off the street) traveling backwards through various locations in New York City.

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.

For a New Year's greeting ecard this year, Paris-based photographer Noël Bourcier decided to put his camera equipment to good use, but not in the way you'd expect. He gathered up some of the camera equipment at the EFET School's photography program, recruited a couple of photography students, and turned the equipment into the simple stop-motion ecard seen above.

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..

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.

Dream Music: Part 2 is an amazing stop-motion and time-lapse video by Marc Donahue and Sean Michael Williams that features a technique they call "lyric-lapsing". Using still photos, they somehow planned the time-lapse sequences just right, so that the singer in the video is actually mouthing the words as he scurries around to various locations. They state that the video is a "musical voyage into the depths of the subconscious", and that it was designed to "transport the viewer from their own reality into a world of dreams and at the end, [...] awake to wonder how we were able to take them there."

The magnitude of the effort is what's truly impressive. The creators spent six months shooting the photos across two states. Every 3-4 seconds seen in the video required about 6-8 hours of work to create.

This creative stop-motion video was created over the course of one year by a boy named Kristen (unbeatableme on YouTube). He took at least one photograph every day for 365 days showing himself standing in front of a whiteboard. By changing elements inside the shot (e.g. his clothing, the art on the whiteboard, his hair), Kristen made one of the most "time-consuming" animation projects we've seen.

Computer generated imagery is becoming ubiquitous in the world of filmmaking, but some people still prefer some good ol' fashioned elbow grease. Los Angeles-based filmmaker Vu Hoang of Westscape Media spent 7 months creating this stop-motion love story, titled "Love Drama". Why did it take so long? Well, Hoang and his small crew of 3 people created all the animation seen using 3,000 photographs -- photos that were shot frame by frame and individually cut out by hand.

Filmmakers Derek Kwok and Henri Wong of Parabucks created this ridiculously awesome stop-motion short film titled "Batman: Dark Knightfall" using highly-realistic 1/6-scale collectible action figures by Hong Kong toy company Hot Toys. Be sure to turn on HD when you watch it.

The cinematic lighting and sound effects give this film a realism that you'll be hard pressed to find in a stop-motion video -- at times you won't believe that what you're seeing isn't showing real actors.

Nothing like starting off the weekend with some gorgeous footage of the City of Lights. This video comes courtesy …

Surprisingly enough, this isn't the first time somebody has recreated Super Mario using sticky notes, nor is it the first time we've featured it, but given the improved production value and the fact that this one comes complete with a behind the scenes video... well... we couldn't help ourselves.

So up top you'll find a downright awesome recreation of Super Mario (and a few of his pixelated buddies) using 7,000 sticky notes. While down below you'll find a behind the scenes video showing how Mario went from piles of multi-colored Post-its to stop motion character.

Stop-motion projects often require mind-blowing amounts of work and preparation. Just how mind-blowing? Music duo Daniel Larsson and Tomas Redigh (AKA Rymdreglage) recently poured out 100 boxes of LEGO pieces that each contained 650 blocks. They then had two cameras snap a photo every 20 seconds as they spent a whopping 71 hours sorting by color. The time-lapse video was created using the 12,775 photos that each memory card ended up with.

Orrin Hastings spent three months creating this stop-motion music video for the song …

Here’s a fun little 30-second stop motion video showing a roll of 35mm film loading itself into a camera.

UK-based nothinghereok purchased an old engine off eBay to replace his old one …

Water drop photographer Corrie White creates pretty neat “time-lapse” videos of water drops …

This time-lapse video by Benjamin Ducroz, titled Points in Space and shot in …

Feast your eyes on this amazing stop motion music video idea for the song “Rivers and Homes” by electronic …

This fascinating video by Hayley Morris for Hilary Hahn and Hauschka's "Bounce Bounce" is both a very creative use of stop motion, and a testament to her skill as a craftsman. She actually created the entire underwater world, sketching and creating the characters herself.

If you like PES’ stop-motion videos in which random objects are prepared as food, you’ll love this …

Luminaris is an amazing stop-motion short film by Argentinean director Juan Pablo Zaramella.

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.

San Francisco-based indie band Wildlife Control made …

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 …

Here’s a simple yet brilliant stop-motion video showing a person sitting at a table plays with shapes. Instead of …

Address Is Approximate is a beautiful and creative stop-motion video by Tom Jenkins of …

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.