Types of Stop-motion animation

June 21st, 2008 by admin

There are different types of Stop-motion animation

1. Clay animation – Clay models are used as objects to be animated. A light aluminum wire and thermocole armature/skeleton is first made upon which the colored clay is coated. Some models also have miniature clothes stitched for them while others mite have the clothes itself made of clay. A very famous example of Clay animation is the film Wallace and Gromit by Aardman Animations. Another style of clay animation is the Embossed effect animation in which the clay models are almost flat such that they can be placed on a horizontal surface with a camera vertically above it and then be animated. This technique is used when you want to show motion of fishes underwater or of flying birds; and it works because you don’t have to bother animating against gravity.
2. Puppets – Another form of stop-motion animation can be used by animating puppets made out of wood or plastic or any other material.
3. Sand – This is another very beautiful medium for animation. Here’s how to animate with sand. Take a flat surface and put thin layer of sand on it. Now place a camera vertically above the surface. Now with your finger make some shape in the sand, now click the image, now modify the shape slightly and click an image again. Keep on gradually modifying the sand surface and keep on clicking images. And when you will play it you’ll get a beautiful animation.
4. Beads – A similar style can be tried with colored beads, wherein you make designs with beads and you photograph them.
5. Cut out – In this style you use images cut out from magazines to animate. The images are placed on a horizontal surface and then moved frame by frame.
6. Pixilation – In this method live humans are used as stop-motion animation props. A very good example of this is the old sci-fi movies in which actors acting on screen used to just vanish in a split second; one frame they are there and the other they are gone. An awesome example is Norman McLaren’s Neighbors and A Chairy Tale. A must watch.

Types of animation mediums

June 21st, 2008 by admin

Animation can be basically 2D or 3D but when we use different mediums we get different types of animations. Lets have a look at them.

1. Traditional 2D Animation on Cells– As I’ve told before it is a type of animation where each frame is hand-drawn, right from the character to the props, the environment and also the backdrop everything is meticulously hand painted.
2. Stop-motion – In this technique the object to be animated is shot with a still camera, now the camera is kept steady and the object is moved slightly and another still frame is captured, again the object is moved and its image is shot and so on. Now, when the still frames are played, since the camera was motionless the object now appears to be in motion. Hence the name Stop-Motion. This basic idea of Stop-motion has been extended to various mediums such as clay, puppets, cutouts, sand etc.
3. Computer Generated – As the name suggests all animations generated with the help of a computer fall under this category be it 2D or 3D. Softwares such as ToonBoom and Macromedia Flash are used for making 2D animations. Where as softwares like 3Dstudio Max, Maya, Lightwave3D, Houdini, SoftImage etc. are used to create animations ranging from home experiments to high-end computer generated imagery. An example of a very high end CG film is Final Fantasy made in Maya 1.0. Also have a look at Beowulf released in 2007. The stunning CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) will make you wonder how thin the line between real and CG has become.

a female model from Final Fantasy