Digital Commons at Penn State

The technique used to animate many objects in older films is called Stop Motion, but make no mistake this type of animation is still viable and used today. Stop Motion, also known as Claymation (stop animation using clay), is a form of animating an object frame by frame. Lets look at how it works.

Here is a simplistic stop motion animation that I made just sitting at my desk. To start I set a frame with the cup of tea and a start point for my tea bag. I took a single picture; afterwards I moved the tea bag just slightly to the left and took another picture. I continued moving the tea bag taking a single picture frame at a time until I went full circle, then I used quick time to open a “still image sequence” quick time then asked me to choose frame rate, for this animation I chose 10 Frames a second. Now I have a stop motion animation, albeit a simple one.

Animations using Stop Motion don’t have to be this simple though, just take a look around the Internet for Stop Motion and you will see some pretty amazing stuff going on. Stop Motion is ideal for being lower budget in nature verses Computer Animation. You can still even see Stop Motion in professional productions. The recent Tim Burton Movie “The Corpse Bride” was done with Stop Motion techniques., among many other projects.

One of the great things about Stop Motion is that anyone can do it; in fact everything you need to perform stop motion animations can be located at the Digital Commons. All you need is the Digital Commons Still Camera, an idea, lots of time, and you can finish with the Digital Commons Editing Computers. If you do decide to do a stop motion video send it by at digitalcommons@psu.edu we’d love to see them.

Here is a short Claymation video that Digital Common's own Chris Millet did a few years ago Click here to watch!