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

Finally

[Stregano]

I can finish my glorious recreation of the California Raisins singing "Heard it to the Grapevine"

Plenty of smartphone apps too

[jordan314]

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.

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

[Mprx]

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.

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:Uhhh... Yeah

[LBt1st]

That's like predicting that people will stop painting because we have applications like Painter.

Re:How can it be cheaper?

[EvanED]

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.

Re:How can it be cheaper?

[MeanMF]

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."

Re:How can it be cheaper?

[Hognoxious]

Um, yes. That's the idea behind setting keyframes: you only specify where things are at certain points, and the computer interpolates for you.

Speaking as someone who's heard of Ray Harryhausen, that's not stop-motion. That's some kind of half-assed CGI mashup.

Now get, in a slightly jerky fashion, off my lawn.

Apples & apples

[dazedNconfuzed]

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.

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")

Re:Apples & apples

[westlake]

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

Plug: iStopMotion

[SillySilly]

I've used iStopMotion -- and loved it. Only a customer, not connected with the company in any way.

Lego stop motion

[mischi_amnesiac]

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.

Made a stop-motion movie with my kids

[Eponymous Coward]

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.

Re:And hardware...

[pimp0r]

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 kid's Rudolph

[westlake]

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.

The Caliris

[Schafer]

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.

Whoever Wins - We Lose

[Dogtanian]

First there was Alien vs. Predator. Then there was Freddy vs. Jason. But it was clear that the crossover fad had gone too far when they announced...

Robots vs. Corpse Bride

Keyframes + physical models

[tepples]

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.

Re:Stop Motion Ken Raping Barbie

[Rip Dick]

EvenIfSheSaysNo,Don't-Stop-Motion is a good app

Re:Attack of the Clones wasn't stop motion???

[ScrewMaster]

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.

It was. It stopped the motion of my hand reaching for my wallet to buy tickets.