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Gonna make a stop motion film – any cool effects to commend? Maybe PS or Adobe After Effects +++
Hello!
Me and some friends made a stop motion movie last winter, and did win many contests. This winter we are gonna make a new movie – much better! But, we need a lot of cool effects in this movie, and need som help from you. Do you have any ideas?
In stop motion movies, there are ca. 15 pictures in one second movie, so it’s very hard to edit 100 pictures in Photoshop for 7 second with movie 😛 So we think that we are gonna use effects in Adobe Premiere to make something cool into the stop motion-pictures, and I will learn some effects in Adobe After Effects to use. But, in Adobe AE, do you know some cool stuf which is not so difficult to learn? This is very important!
This is the video we made last winter: [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usy3twKCPgY[/url] I think we used two days or something.
[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9RKcoxzGJ4&feature=channel[/url] This is an example of a video with many cool effects. We are gonna take a lot from this movie, especielly the puzzle-part and the scenes with both video and stop motion.
Do you have any suggestions? 😀 When we make movies, we are going this way: First we find the cool effects we are going to use, and then we are making a story around thoose. So feel free to give us som tips and trix! 😀 Thank you!
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3 Replies
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[Sondre Rahm] “Do you have any suggestions? 😀 When we make movies, we are going this way: First we find the cool effects we are going to use, and then we are making a story around thoose.”
Well, that certainly works for Michael Bay:-)
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OK that was not helpful. Funny, but not helpful.
After seeing your first demo, I would suggest your next logical step is to forget building these in photoshop OR Aftereffects, buy real stop-mo software and get most of the work done in actual production, leaving relatively little to edit later.
On the mac, my kids really enjoy iStopmotion by Boinx software. What this has that is of use to you is that it offers onion-skinning as well as the ability to go back and re-shoot any one frame in a sequence. You can play back your movie on location on the laptop as you shoot it, and make corrections to any individual bad frames while you’re still there, seeing how the movie flows backwards and forwards. The advanced version also offers greenscreening so that you can substitute new backdrops or multiply one person or object into an army of clones, each doing something different on their own layer, but all interacting. It is also handy for trick shots like tossing a stop-mo animated ball or other object that needs to be suspended midair or something between takes.
These kinds of features are not flashy, but are important and can let you enhance storytelling, way more than cheesey laser and explosion effects can. The best effects don’t look like effects, the audience thinks they’re real.
Boinx offers free trial versions to download and play with for your mac. I urge you to try it out or just look over their galleries.
On the PC side, you might try a product called anim8tor. There are many more options at various price and feature levels.
Or go to a place like download.com or versiontracker.com and keyword search for stop-motion and time-lapse spoftware/freeware/shareware for something you can afford. Time-lapse software and stop-mo software share a lot of common functions so search both terms.
Best of luck. Animation is a lonely and tedious but ultimately very rewarding means of creative expression.
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You could try some in-camera effects..
Like some focus pulls.. maybe simulate in AE or a 3D app first, get your animation curves looking nice and then create dope sheets for animation.. so each frame you capture you turn the focus wheel around a little. Or you could make some kind of dolly rig to move the camera around between frames.. Thats what I would be messing with anyway, if I ever had the time to do stop motion!
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