The beginnings of film featured animation techniques that are still being utilized and developed today. One of the earliest forms of animation was stop-motion claymation animation. It began with films like "King Kong" and developed into "The Nightmare Before Christmas", "Celebrity Deathmatch", "Wallace & Gromit", and "Coraline". With a simple camera and a computer you can create a stop-motion production of your own, using a mix of claymation figures and other props at your disposal.
Instructions
Pre-Production
1. Plan your stop-motion movie. During a stop-motion production, almost nothing can be improvised, everything should be planned out, written down and ready to film. The first step in planning your stop motion is coming up with an idea. Think of settings, props and other elements that you'll need to incorporate into the production. Do not try and remember it all. Write everything out and keep it organized.
2. Write the script to the production. This is one of the most important elements to the movie, because the script will guide the rest of the production and how things are shot. It will detail expressions and effects that need to be planned for, as well as multiple costumes and other details.
3. Create storyboards for the film. This is where you break down the script to visualize the movie and plan different shots and angles. Because of the way stop-motion movies are made, you should plan on having multiple cameras to create multiple angles of the same scene.
4. Build your movie. This step is one of the most time-consuming. For the characters, you can use a mix of homemade clay figures and action figures. Less important figures can easily be in the scene as an action figure, especially during low-budget productions. Use different-colored felt to create costumes for the characters. Barbie outfits also work well for finding different styles.
5. Create your customized clay figures. This is one of the most challenging parts of the movie, but once they are created, you have an original character that has never been seen before. Use a wired base to create the character's skeleton. This base is key to making the character flexible. Create a small wired loop in spots for the hands and feet. Twist two of the metal wires together to build a strong neck. Build the clay up around the character and work on it until the desired character has been made.
6. Make the characters' heads separate from the bodies. This makes it easier to switch heads featuring different expressions or necessary scene changes like damage, glasses and other accessories. The different heads will also take away wear and tear on the characters like fingerprints.
7. Build the sets for the characters. One of the most important factors is making the sets match the character sizes. Visit a hobby and model store to find buildings, shrubbery and other ideas. A craft store will also feature a lot of different accessories that can be used to create the different sets.
8. Rehearse your script. You do not have to go through movement by movement, but you should plan out how the whole production will interact with everything and how your shots will work out. Take a couple of test shots and see how the lighting and characters look. Make changes as needed.
Production
9. Start the production. The key with claymation and stop-motion projects is having patience. Each second of final film takes around 30 separate pictures, so that is 1,800 pictures for 1 minute of film. That adds up to 54,000 pictures for 30 minutes of a movie. The number increases dramatically if multiple cameras are used.
10. Use tripods for all of your cameras and make sure that they are secure. Any slight camera movement during a scene will create a rocky unnatural movement during the final viewing of the movie. The camera should be as secure as possible during every scene.
11. Take a picture and then move the scene slightly before the next picture. Imagine everything moving in really slow motion. Eventually you will reach your final goal, but it will take a while to get there.
12. Upload all of the pictures onto your computer when the production has completed. Keep all of the props and scenes just in case any new scenes need to be taped and filled in for the production.
13. Organize the pictures into separate folders. With so many files it may be easy to get confused, so you should keep it organized by scene, camera angle and separate takes. This will make the rendering a lot faster.
14. Start a new editing project in an advanced editing program like Adobe Premiere Pro. Do one scene at a time and load all of the pictures from the scene into the program. Place each picture into the timeline in sequential order. Render a video. Take the video and increase its speed to how long the scene is supposed to be. Render that file and watch the clip to see if the speed is correct. Adjust as needed.
15. Repeat this process until all of the scenes have been rendered with the real-time process. Now you can edit the clips together and work with them as if they were regular clips. Add effects, sound effects and editing tools to finalize your movie.
16. Add the finishing touches to the project and use a "motion blur" effect to make the characters look more lifelike. Render the final project and enjoy the stop-motion movie.
