Her Morning Elegance

This stop motion video was featured on Yahoo.com today and has over 2 million view on Youtube. Just thought I'd share it.

Random Animation

Here's some of the random animation I did. It's not the best because I did two things that an animator shouldn't do. First of all, I used natural lighting, so the lighting changes because of clouds covering the sun. I also touched the camera to take each picture, so there's a considerable amount of shake. I mainly did it for the animation though, so it doesn't matter too much. Here's the video:



I found that I'm a little bit off with animating at 24 fps, so I set this at 20 fps. That's something I'll have to work on next time.

Here's a random tip that I'll leave you with. If you want to compress something fairly well without much quality loss, use Xvid. I got this video down from around 400mb to 8mb without much change.

Happy Year of the Ox!

In light of the season, here's a short, supposedly cut-out, animation.



I'll be posting some of the random animation I've done recently within the next few days. It's nothing special, but at least it shows me some areas I could improve on if I ever get to feeling good enough to do this other short.

Video: Making of ASP "Me"

A video of the making of ASP "Me" was put up on You Tube recently, and is a way to get a look at a how short animation was created. The animation uses a lot of digital effects like green screen and chroma key so it was interesting to see some of those things being done as well as pre-vis, animation, and other neat things. The video is below. If you would like to watch the actual ASP Me video I've also included a link.



ASP "Me" Video on You Tube

Videos: Coraline

Here are some videos I found on You Tube that talk a little bit about the upcoming stop motion film Coraline. They help give you an idea of what the movie is going to be like and also give you a little of a behind the scenes look. It looks like it will be an interesting movie. There are four videos that I've placed in a player below. Hope you enjoy.

Video: Human Flip Book

Here's a neat stop motion animation done with shirts. In each frame, the shirt gets changed and a little story gets played out. See it for yourself below.

Video: Become

Here's a cool animation done by Dan Mackenzie from Mack Productions. It shows the creation of a clay stop motion animate puppet.

Video: Tips from Javan Ivey

Here's a video done by Indy Mogul where they interviewed Javan Ivey (I've posted about him before) and asked him some easy tips for clay animation and stop motion animation. They're basic tips, but good ones nonetheless. Enjoy.

Video: MUTO

Here's an awesome video I first saw about 2 months ago, but forgot to share. It's a stop motion video where somebody painted on walls in a city or something. If you ask me, it's pretty amazing.

Make Your Video Widescreen

Want to give your claymation or animation a more professional look? Many professional films nowadays are filmed in wide screen format or at least edited in post to be output as wide screen. To me personally, it just looks more appealing. If you do want to learn more about what widescreen is and what it is all about, I've included resource links below. Here's a quote from one of them, explaining a little why widescreen works.

Since 1955, most movies were (and are) filmed in a process where the width of the visual frame is between 1.85 to 2.4 times greater than the height. This means that for every inch of visual height, the frame as projected on the screen is between 1.85 to 2.4 times as wide. This results in a panoramic view that when used properly can add a greater breadth and perception of the environment and mood of a movie.

How do you convert your video to widescreen format though? Well, it's pretty simple. You'll first need to get Virtualdub, a free video editing program, and then you'll have to follow this relatively-easy-to-understand tutorial. If you follow the directions as given, you'll have your videos in widescreen format in no time.

Resources:
Virtualdub Website
Tutorial Page
Widescreen Wiki Page
Widescreen.org

Lord of the Rings

Not too long ago, I watched a bunch of the behind the scenes stuff for the Lord of the Rings. If you happen to be able to, I suggest that you get your hands on a copy of the DVD's that come with behind the scene stuff. Borrow them from a friend, dig them up from your movie drawer, rent them, or even buy them. The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy is awesome as a film piece, but also a great resource to learn from. It was a film of tremendous size and filled with special effects and innovations. If you have the DVD's, not only can you study the film, but also watch how they made it. Some of the things that I took notice of were miniatures, special effects, color grading, scoring, sound effects, and much more. On the DVD's they go through so many aspects of film making, giving a glimpse and idea of how an actual film is made. It's good to just know about and find out about these things so that you can adapt them to your own film. Sure, you're not creating live action, but that doesn't matter. Film is film and aspects of it, no matter what medium it was created with, do share some qualities. A stop motion animated film still needs to be graded, scored, have special effects added, it still needs a good story, as well as many other things. So I encourage you to look at this masterpiece, to study it, learn from it, and adapt it.

Videos: Meet the California Raisins

Here are some videos I watched a long time ago and then rediscovered. All three parts are part of one original production. They were made back in 1988 when the California Raisins were popular. It was done by Will Vinton's studio and runs around 30 minutes in total.

Animate Clay Vlogs

If you keep track of Animate Clay's news updates you'll already know this, but Marc Spess has been creating some pretty interesting videos about different topics related to stop motion animation for his site. Not only do the videos add a more personal touch to the news, but they also share more effectively and teach more. It's a great way to learn new stuff. The videos are hosted on Youtube so if you have an account, I encourage you to subscribe to his channel. Anyways, here is the link. If you need to find out more information, just go to Animateclay.com. I've also included an example video so that you can get a taste without leaving the blog.

Animate Clay's YouTube Page

Video Editor: Avidemux

Here's another free video editing program that I found called Avidemux. It looks like that it might be a little like Virtualdub, but it probably has some differences. If you've downloaded Virtualdub and don't really care for the interface, you should maybe check this out and see if you like it better. If you haven't try both and choose which ever one you like. On the site there is a forum as well as a Wiki page so there should be no problems in learning how to use the program. As always, links are below.

Avidemux Main Page
Avidemux Forum
Avidemux Wiki

Videos: Claymation Documentary

Here's a neat documentary I found while browsing around You Tube one day. I never knew such a thing existed. It was done a while back(1978 to be exact) in the early days of Will Vinton Productions. The whole thing is a little under 20 minutes or so. If you have time, watch it now, if not, come back later.

Camera Mapped Test for The Hole

I don't usually like posting too much in one day, but I'm going to anyways since this is related to the last post. I was actually working on it while writing the last one and had to let it render and upload later. Anyways, this is a test for something that I may try for "The Hole". Basically, it gives me the opportunity to do a more extreme camera move in the world of animation where you would normally have to use a motion control rig. In this test, I used a miniature(didn't have enough clay sitting around to make a large one) version of the character, set it on a table, and took a picture. Then on the computer, I edited the picture so that the background would be flat and so that there would be a hole in the table. After that was done, I went though the process of camera mapping it. Normally I would not try this for an animation, but in this case it is more easily done because of the simple shapes of the set and character(everything has to roughly be modeled in CG, complicated stuff would take forever). After doing it once, I have an idea of how I could probably make it better, but won't share all the details now(those will either come much later on the blog or in a short book on the making of "The Hole"). Here's the video. Keep in mind that it is a test, so it wasn't done to my best ability.

Video: Throwing Ball Claymation

Here's another animation I did today. It's not quite to my satisfaction, but good enough. I may edit the wire out later, if I'm bored sometime, but not now. It's pretty crazy, I've done 7 animations in the past 2 weeks, that's 4 more than I completed in all of last year.

Video: Random Clay Animation

Here's the animation I did. It's pretty random, although you'll probably notice elements from some of the other "blob" animations I've done recently. Since it's just a test, I'm not bothering with editing out the wires.

Video: Water Magic Trick

Here's another animation I did today. I didn't do too good on it however. The arms of the guy kept giving me too much trouble, and I wasn't able to portray it how I imagined. At the start, he's supposed to be rubbing his hands. I guess you do good on some, bad on others, that's what practice is for.



I also went on You Tube today and found a bunch of videos for future blog posts. I'll have to write them up sometime though.

Making of Nightmare Before Christmas

If you've ever seen The Nightmare Before Christmas, you may be a little bit interested in how it was made. Even if you haven't, you still may be interested in how it was made. It is "an animated musical 1993 film produced and written by Tim Burton, directed by Henry Selick and scored by Danny Elfman. The film was based on Burton's characters and original story." If you want to read more on the story, click here to go to the Wikipedia page on it. To see a little of how the movie was made, just look below.