Last night, I wanted to see if a concept I had for making an object appear in mid-air in stop motion animation (to look like it's falling, flying, or floating) would work. I'm imagining it's a pretty standard way of doing it, but I wanted to see if I could do it. After the break, I've included a step by step "How-To" guide for how I got the ball to look like it was in the air. Click "Read More" to... read more. Here's the video: Ignore the snigger-worthy name; I've been dabbling with clay-mation recently, and this time, I wanted to see if I could create the illusion of an object in mid-air and animate it. This was a proof-of-concept test, so I wasn't so fussed with getting slick animation as I was about seeing whether I could float an object. The concept was simple: ![]() 1. I photographed a "clean" frame of the empty table.
5. To finish, I repeated this for all of the pictures with coins in (I reused the same cut out shadow for the ball in all of them, but realistically, I should have made the shadow move and contract slightly as the ball dropped). Once the ball was actually touching the table, I could remove the shadow I had created, and just use the photos I had taken, unedited. Then I ran the edited pictures together into a film using Cateater's fantastic Stop Motion Studio, repeating the first and last images a few times to give the movement a bit of room to breathe, and created and added title cards. The sound effect was me slapping a fork into a pan of pasta in sauce I cooked after I'd finished putting the film together. I was hungry! While the actual taking of the 16 photographs used didn't take more than about 10-15 minutes, the whole process took a good couple of hours, though I was getting faster at editing the pictures by the end.
Ideally, my support for the ball would have been something a lot smaller than a stack of coins - a wire support maybe, to leave less to take away from each image and speeding the editing up, but I made do with what I had in the small hours of the morning when the idea occurred to me. So there you have it: a successful method for stop-frame animating an object in mid-air! What do you think? Have you any experience of doing something similar yourself? Do you have any tips or advice to share? Leave me a comment! |
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