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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."
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.
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
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.
Even better would be pure-animation Robots vs. Corpse Bride, made same year with $75M vs. $40M budgets.
Robots:
Run time 91 minutes
Corpse Bride:
Run time 77 minutes
55 week shoot.
Corpse Bride was the first stop-motion feature to be edited in Apple's Final Cut Pro.
The puppets used neither of the industry standards of replaceable heads (like those used on The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)) or replaceable mouths (like those used by Aardman Studios in Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)) but instead used precision crafted clockwork heads, adjusted by hidden keys. This allowed for unprecedented subtlety, but was apparently even more painstaking than the already notoriously arduous animation. One animator even reported having recurring nightmares of adjusting his own facial expression in this fashion. Corpse Bride
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.
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.