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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."
What is a computer going to do, move the model for you? Snap the frame for you?
Um, yes. That's the idea behind setting keyframes: you only specify where things are at certain points, and the computer interpolates for you.
It also means that if you messed up a shot in some way you don't have to go all the way back and reshoot: you can just fix it and rerender.
It also means that you don't have to build physical models or buy a camera.
RTFA... "To simulate movement and expression, animators bend or twist their objects ever so slightly between shots, a painstaking process that makes it difficult to achieve consistency from frame to frame. But now, software can help remedy that, with programs that help check the alignment of the camera and the lighting of the scene while letting the animator flip between recent images to see if the items are moving realistically. That part of the process — synchronizing the shots — was what made it difficult for amateurs to make a good movie."
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?
I've used iStopMotion -- and loved it. Only a customer, not connected with the company in any way.
And since this is /. - what about OSS tools?
http://developer.skolelinux.no/info/studentgrupper/2005-hig-stopmotion/
Available from a ubuntu/debian/etc repository near you.
The big problem with stop motion is the lack of motion blur. Film is still shot at 24fps, so there's normally a huge amount of blur, and stop motion looks very different without it. It's possible to simulate motion blur by moving the models while photographing each frame (Robocop did a reasonably good job with this), but most films don't bother and the stop motion looks unnatural.