planet romero

Strange, name for the post above is “guest”…

oh well, I can confirm it was me who posted it.

Cheers bro. I’ve been meaning to do some more, but so much stuff is getting in the way at the moment…

The interest is still there, but I’ll save it for my next week off(I think there’s one at the end of the month).

That was pretty good.

The thing is, most of the people practicing stop motion on Youtube could provide better results if given a good quality armature or puppet. With action figures etc, you don’t have the option of tie-downs.

Flying creatures are also very hard to do in SM. The set up is quite fragile with thin and wobbly wires, so that technique can be rather frustrating at times!

Thinking further on it, although I have mostly animated using Computer animation, I feel stop motion is not only a medium in itself, but a great teaching tool for learning the idea and basics of computer animation.

If I were to explain the basics of stop motion to a person in the street, its easy to understand – and simple enough for them to try at home: A simple coin moving across a table and a camera that can shot and hold the frames, and then upload to a computer. The Youtube generation is doing it now.

However, computer animation – simply because one needs to know how to use a computer – is more intimidating: You create a 3D model, animate it using keyframes, set up the camera view, and then render out each frame…by this time I would be getting a funny look from the person I was explaining it to!

My conclusion for Stop Motion photography(oo-er!) is that it is both blessed and cursed by the physical world. It has the advantage of real light and texture – something a computer simply cannot compete with – no matter how powerful the computer and its software is. And the technique can be learned and practiced in a matter of an afternoon. However, it’s easy for a model to break with enough repeated stress, hard to keep the puppet standing up and still, and you need to have fantastic machining skills and a decent size work space to do anything worthwhile.

Saying that, although computers are now used for animation, its easy to say “stop motion is dead”, but stop motion is practiced by more people today than back in the time before CGI emerged. The only difference is that most of the film industry has ditched Stop motion – but of course, what Hollywood says is true most will believe. The reality is that stop motion is stronger than ever as an art form.