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Cheap Software Tools Give New Life To Stop-Motion Animation
An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times reports that a wide variety of new stop motion animation tools are making it simpler to create stop-motion movies. The new tools are helping animators run more than three times faster than they did just a few years ago. Some even say that stop motion is cheaper than computer generated animation. Tools like Dragon Stop Motion, Stop Motion Pro and iKitMovie are just a few of the tools that are reinvigorating the space."
I can finish my glorious recreation of the California Raisins singing "Heard it to the Grapevine"
The world is how you make it
There are plenty of smartphone apps out there too (several on the iPhone at least), which is a really great use of the camera and software at once. They support previous frame overlays, time-lapse, and frame-by-frame deleting and editing, which are a boon for quick creativity.
Some even say that stop motion is cheaper than computer generated animation
Well yes - that's why when computers were invented we didn't instantly switch to CGI for our movies, it took time to come around - Stop motion has ALWAYS been cheaper.
The problem is: It doesn't look as nice.
Cut out the director's and actors' Salaries from the movies, and guess which one had a higher budget: Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer or Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones.
How can it be cheaper to do stop motion on a computer? Without a computer it is a process of move the model, snap a frame. What is a computer going to do, move the model for you? Snap the frame for you?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Free python software: Toonloop.
Better CGI-to-stopmotion comparison is SW2 with Corpse Bride, with budgets of $115M vs. $40M respectively, which lines up pretty well accounting for subtracting non-animation costs, and considering they were made only 3 years apart and done within the same general Hollywood system.
Even better would be pure-animation Robots vs. Corpse Bride, made same year with $75M vs. $40M budgets.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
How can it be cheaper to do stop motion on a computer? Without a computer it is a process of move the model, snap a frame. What is a computer going to do, move the model for you? Snap the frame for you?
In addition to the features cited by MeanMF from TFA, would interpolation be feasible? Ya know, so the animator doesn't have to make such minuscule changes.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I've used iStopMotion -- and loved it. Only a customer, not connected with the company in any way.
Two weeks ago I spoke with a man who shot the last harry potter book as lego stop motion. Here is the english trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xedFmxo7hc0&feature=channel
He uses 25 pictures per second of film. It is a hobby of his and he spent two years making it. Every evening during the week and the complete day on weekends. In my opinion it nearly looks as good as rendered.
"Die endgueltige Teilung Deutschlands - das ist unser Auftrag." - Chlodwig Poth
I think Stop Motion looks way better than CGI ..it is tactile..real...has greater depth..real artistry..
It seems we are so used to inexpensive (but of very good quality) digicams that TFS doesn't even mention how connecting them to a PC running said software is what ultimately enabled this renaissance?
And since this is /. - what about OSS tools? (I was thinking about something basic to display neighboring frames via transparent overlay, useful for one pet project I keep postponing; but something tells me some tools are out there already)
One that hath name thou can not otter
I will either name it:
Cyborg Swan
or
Android Duck
Any ideas?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
One boring Saturday, my kids and I made a couple of stop motion movies using their toys, our crappy point and shoot camera, and iMovie. We put the camera on a tripod and moved the toys around in front of it (it was a chase scene). Take a picture, move the toys a bit, take another picture, etc... After taking hundreds of pictures, we had iMovie make a slide show with them, showing each picture for 1/10 second (at the time, that was as fast as iMovie would go), then burned it to a DVD. The movies were only a minute or so long, but it was fun and easy.
What has worked out really well for me is a simple Python script that uses QT to generate movies from individual frames. I've used it for time-lapses, but it could probably be used for stop-motion movies too. Of course, you don't get all the composing features of these tools, but it's free and works exceedingly well.
http://www.ecogito.net/anil/2010/09/howto-create-a-time-lapse-movie-from-a-sequence-of-images/
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
And it is a great entry-level stop-motion program (from another long-time customer).
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
This is very much off-topic, but Kamil asked me to do his English homework for him but did not keep his part of the deal so I'm posting this here so that his teacher will hopefully google it and give him an F.
In a small town there was an abandoned cemetery. People did not visit it because it was said that it is haunted. A new family with two children moved into town. People told them about the cemetery, but the parents only laughed at it. The children, though, they were frightened by that story. What is worse, their house was very close to the cemetery. So close, that it could be seen through the back windows. The parents did not believe in ghosts, but the children did. One night, when the parents went out for a romantic diner, the children were left alone. It was nearing midnight when Amy and Tom heard a woman singing outside. They rushed to the window and saw a white figure sitting on one of the tombstones. Then, she suddenly looked straight at them and grinned wickedly before vanishing into thin air. Amy screamed in terror and ran to her room. When she got to the stairs, she saw a shadow on top of them, she could feel it was the ghost. The white lady slowly approached the frightened girl, took her face into her hands and before the frightened little girl could react, snapped her neck in two. Tom, still petrified by the window, only now realised Amy was missing. When the parents finally returned later at night, they found Tom shivering in a closet and Amy on the floor with "Do you believe in ghosts?" written in blood next to her.
The real question is what could "Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer" have looked like if it had the time, modern benefits and budget you mentioned. Not to say it'd look as nice, but I'm sure it'd be better (assuming they don't stay with the kiddie looking format
The "look" persists because Rudolph" has always been a story for kids.
"Rudolph" began as a 1939 coloring book distributed freely to children by Montgomery Ward. Gene Autry recorded the Johnny Marks song in 1949. The Rankin/Bass special for NBC was broadcast in 1964.
Can anybody recommend some FOSS or at least free-as-in-beer equivalents?
Some even say that stop motion is cheaper than computer generated animation
Cut out the director's and actors' Salaries from the movies, and guess which one had a higher budget: Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer or Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones.
I'm confused. I thought Attack of the Clones was stop motion.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I know something of Jamie and Dyami, the brothers behind Dragon Stop Motion. Jamie and I were introduced by our sons on a bike ride in 2004.
Jamie has a long history of directing award-winning stop-motion animation, from music videos to Super Bowl ads. On top of his visual aesthetic skills, he has a long history of craftsmanship (builds his own camera motion systems, creates beautiful stereo-optical systems of glass, wood, and brass). I think the artistry runs in the family.
By the time he started working on "Dragon" for United Airlines, he had become fed up with the current state of stop motion support software, especially when it came to DSLR control. He took his concerns to his brother, Dyami, who began coding after hours to support Jamie's concept.
The interesting thing is that they were not in the same city. Dyami would code new features (including hardware control via poorly-documented APIs) and, if needed, debug with Jamie over the phone. I have run large teams of very good developers, but very few are so good they can do that type of work efficiently. Talking with Jamie at the time, he said little debug was required; he would conceive of a feature one day and would have code in production the next.
Dragon has since become the brothers' primary focus. When my 10-year-old expressed interest in stop motion, we purchased one of the first copies of Dragon. I expected it would take days for me to start using, and then I would have to teach my son a limited subset of the features. Nope--he picked it up on his own and had his first few seconds of animation that afternoon. (He now keeps his whole SM kit in a backpack so he can shoot at friends' houses after school.) Tools like onion-skinning and short sequence playback made a great difference in the quality of his work.
It says a lot about Jamie's vision and UI expertise that the same tool used for multi-million-dollar movies can also be effectively used by a child. Combined with the stability provided by Dyami's top-notch coding, we couldn't be happier with Dragon. I wish them the best.
The process of producing stop motion video is very similar to producing time lapse, which I have much more interest in. I wonder if these tools would work well for time lapse as well ...
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Robots vs. Corpse Bride
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Re-render? Do you even know what stop motion is?
Yes, and I know that ILM developed a robotic variant of stop-motion that allows the counterpart to CGI re-renders.
Keyframes, interpolation, rerendering, not building physical models - what you are describing is not stop-motion animation.
Take out the "not building physical models" part and you have go motion animation. The animator sets the keyframes, and then a robot moves the models.
Might require, in many cases, an ability of setting up in software at least some rough "understanding" of how the model moves.
But it wouldn't be that much harder than the interpolation seen in the BULLET TIME® effect shots in a decade-old action film called The Matrix.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_motion
> "Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?"
Yes, but you'd get a "All comments below your viewing level" condition.
Place nail here >+
EvenIfSheSaysNo,Don't-Stop-Motion is a good app
"Rudolph" began as a 1939 coloring book distributed freely to children by Montgomery Ward.
Right. It was Robert L. May who actually created the character, while working at Montgomery Ward.
(forget the iBankers, the College on the Hill does turn out some very creative types... :-)
coding is life
Hello,
You should try Toonloop, it's a free software I wrote with the help of other talented developers such as Tristan Matthews. I currently works on GNU/Linux, but should be easily ported to other platforms as well. The main difference between Toonloop the software you list is that Toonloop constantly displays the resulting animation is a constant loop.
Find out more at http://toonloop.com/
Best regards,
Alexandre Quessy
http://alexandre.quessy.net/
interested software tools here it's use that more learn about the software how can operate ..
Xtreme No
"IT'S A TRAP"
They both have their naughty bits molded into permanent undershorts... They can only "bump" the bits.
I am interested in stop-motion animation and committed to doing the animation work on Linux... I look forward to trying your software!
(...There's a way to get a DV camera to appear as a V4L2 device, right?)
Bow-ties are cool.
Don't forget toonloop: http://toonloop.com/
Pretty awesome open source stop motion animation package for traditional and more on-the-fly performance style animation. I've seen people using this application doing really cool stuff on a stage, looping up short animations accompanied by live improvised music.
Curious title for the software, considering it's a WinDoze only product.
Perhaps not unexpectedly TFA doesn't mention licencing of the software but there are several free software stop motion applications available. I've not tried them all but I've posted that link here if people are interested.
Tools like Dragon Stop Motion, Stop Motion Pro and iKitMovie. It's not like you need anything special because it's stop-motion about something different.
You can see it too, when you look at how crappy some of the cartoons being pushed out for tvshows on Teletoon, and such....quicker garbage spewed out, is still garbage. ..it just means you pay less for it as a tv station.
I can not see any real difference in the kids attention span from the old shows from hanna barbara,
you still capture the kids imagination, so how come we need to push so hard for an industry that is really never changing.
The bucks saved by the big cos never really end up seeing the employees reap the benefits, like higher pay grade...
so do not develop these tools, and let those cartoonists pump out more hours on their paychecks and feed their families.
...seeing a remake of Neverhood Cronicles.
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist" -I guess I should leave then