Your puppets are perhaps the most important element of your stop motion production. They keep the model from sagging between shots and assist in making more minute motions for your character. Armatures prevent this by being a skeleton upon which you build the character. Clay models are softer and won’t be able to hold their position over time.
To that end, armatures are a great to use for your characters. Regardless of what you choose, make sure it’s something you can easily manipulate and will hold its position. Modeling clay has long been a preferred choice for stop motion animators since it gives you the freedom to create non-traditional characters, but you can use just about anything: from action figures to LEGOs. Try out a few designs for your characters before setting it in stone, because once production begins, you won’t be able to make changes. Since there aren’t traditional actors, it’s up to you to create characters who not only resonate with audiences but won’t kill you to animate. The materials you use depend on the kind of characters you have. Once preparations are taken care of, it’s time to figure out what you’ll be animating. Do your best to compose everything how you want it before diving into animating. After all, you wouldn’t want to spend hours, or even days, working on a shot you don’t need. Stop motion requires hours of work for mere seconds of usable footage, so having a solid plan of action for every scene is necessary. Tools like storyboards can help you organize your shots in advance so that you don’t waste time on scenes that won’t make it to the final cut or miss important shots that should have been completed before tearing down your setup.Įvery video should be planned out (shot sheets, storyboards, etc) to some degree, but for animation it’s far more crucial. When each shot or sequence may take hours to complete, proper planning becomes vital to the success of your production.
By all means, explore unique ideas you otherwise couldn’t when developing your story, but keep in mind the amount of time necessary to animate. While it’s possible to have an epic battle scene with thousands of characters, animating such a scene with individual models will be time consuming. Stop motion is a form of animation, and as such you must keep the basic principles of animation in mind. Stop motion offers a wealth of possibilities, but it’s incredibly labor intensive. This freedom can be intoxicating but shouldn’t get out of hand. Your restrictions are no longer what you can accomplish with actors and locations, but what you’re able to craft. Writing for an animation isn’t different from normal scripts, but you have more opportunities to let your imagination open wide.
0 kommentar(er)
