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."

Comments

Uhhh... Yeah

[Monkeedude1212]

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.

Re:Uhhh... Yeah

[miserere nobis]

re: "doesn't look as nice". Actually, that isn't something you can say across the board. Filming physical models can often produce superior results. In fact, it takes a whole lot of work on a computer to produce something that looks half as good as simply taking a picture of a real-life object. I actually think a lot of the spaceship action in the original Star Wars movies looked better (where, of course, "better" is definitely a subjective, artistic judgment based on sense of "realism", sense of how much its look fits with the feel of the overall film and so on) than the newer ones which relied more on computer graphics. The difference isn't solely that CGI looks better (though it does in some cases-- think, say, a Godzilla monster, that would rely on a very difficult model or a person in a suit), but that you can do things with it that you can't do with a camera and a real scene, and that you can much, much more easily re-film a scene with slight adjustments.

Re:Uhhh... Yeah

[EdZ]

Because good stop motion and bad stop motion cost almost exactly the same: it's nearly entirely skill based (a good stop motion artist might even work faster than a bad one). Bad CG, however, is a lot cheaper than good CG, because a lot of steps are skipped or slimmed down. More tweening (fewer keyframes), simpler lower resolution textures, no normal maps, specular maps, bump maps, SSS maps, etc, simpler lighting to shorten render time, and so on and so forth.

Re:Apples & apples

[sznupi]

...and how many of us know people who thought Corpse Bride had to be CGI?

(I also knew some thinking the same thing about Sony Bravia San Francisco bouncy balls commercial; and refusing to accept otherwise until linked to "making of")