Stop motion is an animation technique which consists of the movement manipulation of objects which are photographed between each movement. It’s a very time-consuming way of animating. Some very commonly known films such as ‘Wallace and Grommit’, ‘The Night before Christmas’, ‘Coraline’ and ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ were all created using stop motion animation from big named directors such as Tim Burton and Wes Anderson.
Fantastic Mr. Fox was under development for five years before it was released in 2009. The production of this film had a team of around 140 staff, 146 different sets and over 4,000 props. The lead role Mr. Fox took over 7-months to get the first model with around 535 puppets. The film is shot with 12 frames per second and uses around 125,000 individual pictures (Albarran, 2020). The majority of stop motion animations are all developed using a team of people so as a class, we created our own stop motion animation in teams.
In a group of three, Sydney, Jordan, and myself, we developed our own stop motion animation using a mannequin, green screen, an iPhone camera, and a camera stand. As a team we planned to have the mannequin run during the animation.
To create this animation, a team member moved the mannequin into a running position and another team member capture a photograph. Between each photo, the mannequin was delicately placed into another position, not one that would make a lot of difference but enough to create the running illusion when all the captured images are placed together. When only minimally moving the mannequin, the result looks a lot smoother and is clear to view what the object is doing. If there was a big difference in the mannequin’s positions in each photograph, the result would look unprofessional and choppy.
After all the photos were taken, they were then placed into a video editing app to add the photos together. The photos were put on a 0.1 second timer, using minimal seconds also adds to the smoothness of the result.
In conclusion, it is better to work as a team on something as delicate as stop motion animation. Working as a team also speeds up the process of the production, although this project only had a team of three, it was still a lot better then working individually with multiple things to do to create the animation.
References
Albarran, M. (2020) Eleven years of Fantastic Mr. Fox. Stop Motion Magazine. Available online: https://stopmotionmagazine.com/eleven-years-of-fantastic-mr-fox/#:~:text=For%20their%20leading%20character%2C%20%E2%80%9CIt [Accessed 12 Apr. 2023].