This year in school, I took Video Communication as an elective. It was a fun course, and we learned a lot of fundamentals about producing an effective video. One of the projects was a stop-motion animation project. Me and Ryan decided to make a movie about some lego painters.
It turns out that making a stop motion movie is at least three times harder than you would think, but about two times easier than you might fear. We used iStopMotion and these cheap little Logitec webcams. The hardest part was making sure everything stayed the same between frames. Since stop frame animation is just a series of pictures displayed quickly in succession, if we accidently bumped the camera or the set before taking the next frame, it would completely mess up the illusion of movement. After a while we got the process down, but it still took about an hour for every three seconds of footage.
Once we filmed it all, we had to go in and rotoscope some things. Rotoscoping is the process of editing a movie frame by frame to add (or remove) special effects. We accidently left a pen cap in a few frames, so we had to edit that out. We also wanted a scene where it looks like one of the painters is painting the camera, so we had to go in and add that paint frame by frame. Fortunately, I already knew how to use Photoshop fairly well, so this image editing wasn’t too difficult.
The final product came out very cool. It's about thirty seconds long, which I managed by slowing down some of the footage from the full rate of 30 frames per second, and by duplicating a bit of footage. Everything tied together really well, and it came out almost exactly the same as we storyboarded it!