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Video to > Stop Motion Animation Look
Hey guys!
So yesterday, as I was eating breakfast, I saw an ad in my town’s newspapers that invited adults to participate to an stop motion animation contest. So I went to their site and the rules were pretty simple; we had to do an image-per-image animation that lasted for 3 minutes (maximum). That made me remember the good old days when I spent 7 hours straight doing animations with my little GI Joes for only 2 minutes of animation.
So, after reading the instructions I said to myself: ” Wouldn’t be cool if I could just record a video in 30 fps, then bring it in AE and, with some Time Effects or by changing the frame p/s, I could “transform” this video as if it were made with a still camera (stop motion animation) “?
After several attempts, none of this worked so I decided I’d give it a go on COW. (Oh and by the way, yikesmikes, if you read this, could you send me an e-mail to my e-mail account please? – Thx.)
I wouldn’t call this cheating because, after all, doesn’t mean I’ll use my camcorder and AE. Maybe I’ll do it in the old school way. I was simply wondering if this was possible in AE and how to do it.. and, who knows, maybe your solutions will be helpful for the newcomers who searches in the COW’s Archives, since I didn’t found an answer in it :\
Thx for your time guys!
Justin Productions
Ta********@*****il.com
Adobe After Effects 6.5 Professional -
12 Replies
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If you shoot something that’s moving, then it’s not “stop motion”. That would be cheating. 🙂
But if you want something like that for another application, shoot at a high shutter speed to eliminate motion blur and use time>posterize time to reduce the frame rate. That might work, but remember, stop motion often has a bit of irregularity to the motion. That would be hard to simulate.
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nobody would do stop motion if the action that is shown in the movie could be done simply by filming it with a videocamera. f.e. puppet animation, no way to record it in realtime.
every other thing that you can record in realtime will look like its perfectly animated.
one thing you can do is lowering your framerate. set the comp to the framerate of your choice. PAL people normally animate with 12,5 fps. dont know how they go in the NTSC world.
what do you want to show in your movie that should look like stop motion in the end?
payton
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Okay, I get it!
Thx for all the suggestions and your precious time, I’ll try that!
Other suggestions are welcome!
Thank’s again!
Justin Productions
Tangerin01@hotmail.com
Adobe After Effects 6.5 Professional -
there is a way that isnt quick, but it give you a head start.
you could film in high shuuter speeds and then export the footage as a jpeg sequence. then, deleate like 20 frames in each secong.
actually thats sill. the posturise time idea is probably your best bet like steve said.
high shutterspeed
maybe try and film it hand held to add a bit of ruggedness. not to rugged mind
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coz if your gonna cheat? you might as well cheat like pro. hahhaha (professional. not a prostitute)
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I was actually wondering the same thing about making shot footage look like stop motion. And based on the original post, it doesn’t sound like he wants to cheat. Only that the contest made him wonder about the jittery effect (as is how my original thoughts came about as well). I like the suggestion of rendering out to a sequence and deleting some of the frames. I wonder if there is a way to automate that with expressions somehow. Add a wiggle to time adjustment or frame rate? I’m just spewing off the top of my head here. But I welcome any other thoughts. This is how amazing new techniques are born!
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[Dave LaRonde] “Well, if you’re actually going to shoot stop motion animation, you don’t use a TV camera; you use a still picture camera with a LOT of memory.”
… and if it numbers the files sequentially, you then just import the sequence into AE and you have a movie at film res.
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Suffice to say that we understand how stop motion works. We’re just asking how one might go about emulating it with shot video footage in the same way one would go about solving any challenge.
Say a client comes to you with DV footage and says “I want this to look like old 8mm film”. Would you turn to the client and say “Well, you’re cheating and you should reshoot it on REAL 8mm film. See, film is shot on film. And DV is digital. It’s totally different.” Of course you wouldn’t.
Let’s have some brainstorming here, folks.
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Try applying this expression to the Time Remapping property:
t=time+random(.1);
valueAtTime(t)You could also tie the value in brackets (.1 in this case) to an expression slider.
By the way, .03 is one frame in NTSC. Approximately.
This can also be applied to a precomp containing a layer to which Posterize Time has been applied to bring down the frame rate. -
Or:
t=time+random(.09,.2);
valueAtTime(t)… tweak the values until you get something you like.
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