Guide to Making Objects Float in Stop Motion.

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:

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1. I photographed a "clean" frame of the empty table. ​

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​2. Next I photographed the series of pictures with the ball in them - 15 in all, each time raised up on some sort of prop. I had a stack of coins that I took more away from with each shot so the ball would get lower and lower until it was on the table. ​

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​3. In Photoshop, I overlaid one of these pictures onto the clean background, then erased the coins and ball, revealing the clean photo beneath. I did this until I had just the shadow left, which I tidied up with a bit of freehand drawing to create just a shadow for the ball on the clean photo of the table.
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This was my background for all future shots of the ball in the air.

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​4. Then, for each frame, I overlaid it onto the clean frame which now included the newly created shadow.
Next, leaving the ball untouched, I erased just the coins and their shadows and reflections, revealing the images beneath.

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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.
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​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!

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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!