28 Jul 2010 6 Comments
in Animation, stop-motion Tags: stop motion
Here is my first stop motion animation. Very basic! Brendon made the sound track:
Now I will have to do another one.
(I’ve been documenting everything I’ve learnt so far about stop motion animation, from how to build the animation stand to what camera to use. You can find all the posts under the stop motion category of my blog.)
13 Jun 2010 6 Comments
in Animation, stop-motion Tags: Animation, stop motion
One of my most difficult decisions in setting up for stop-motion was choosing the camera.
Most articles on stop-motion for beginners recommend that you start with a simple web-cam. It’s cheap and effective. But I already knew that I wanted to be able to be able to zoom into detail areas, so the images need to be fairly high res. Web-cams produce low resolution images, and so do most other hand-held video cameras. Also – a decent entry-level video camera is much more expensive than a good quality digital stills camera.
So I started looking for a digital still camera. These are the things to look for when buying a digital still camera for stop-motion: More
12 Jun 2010 3 Comments
in Animation, stop-motion Tags: Animation, stop motion
In my previous post on stop-motion animation, I got a little ahead of myself and jumped straight to showing my first experiments. I want to back track a little and start with what I learnt while creating a stop-motion setup.
Today’s post is about the software choices for creating stop-frame animation.
I’m using something called frame-grabber software. Frame-grabbers help to take the guesswork out of creating a stop-motion animation. When animating without a frame-grabber, you take a picture, move the object and take another picture. You need to guess how far to move things, and remember which direction you’ve just moved them in. Sounds simple until you have multiple things moving at different speeds!
Frame-grabbers work like this: More
05 Dec 2009 4 Comments
in Animation, Inspiration Tags: Animation, stop motion
My post on Caroline Leaf’s “Owl and Goose” has lead me to another interesting animation. Spanish musician-animator César Díaz used the same sand on glass technique to create this animation for the song No Corras Tanto.
César is a musician as well as an animator – in fact, he is one of the musicians in El Combolinga, the band responsible for this song . He was kind enough to answer some of my questions.
Firstly – the imagery in the animation was entirely spontaneous and improvised. César says: More
Masha du Toit 
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