The Interesting World of Stop-Motion Animation

READING AND WRITING

Color can have such an important role to play in a finished piece of media. Certain colors evoke certain emotions or are synonymous with setting a mood (like scary, moody, or happy). Red can signal anger or lust, while blue can depict sadness. All of this color theory applies to animation as well.

First off, there are three main ways to describe color: hue, saturation, and value. Hue is just another name for color, so red, green, blue, etc. Saturation refers to the intensity of a color; the more vibrant a color, the higher the saturation. The value of a color is about whether it is dark or light. High value means bright, low value means dark.

Having that as a foundation, you can develop a color script. A color script is the visual storyboard of your piece, outlining key colors and matching them to crucial points in the story. Keeping the color palette limited always you to add more in later if you need to, while it is much harder to take color out once you’ve established it within the story. You also have to pay attention to supporting colors, so that they don’t outshine your main object and the focus can stay where it needs to be.

It is especially true in the world of animation where you can really experiment and test the parameters of your skills, mostly because there really aren’t any set rules. Anything goes. That opens the door wide for trying new skills, failing, creating “bad” art, and testing out new techniques. There are no limitations unless you set them, and I would advise against that.

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RESEARCH TO INFORM

I decided to research some stop motion animation, one of the most classic forms, to get a sense of what is being produced in the world today.

This is a bit of a dark comedy but tells an excellent story in 7 minutes. It’s got a very clear 3 point story arc and a great ending. The animation itself is so detailed, down to the book titles on the shelves. The sound effects really add to the piece as well.

This one left me in awe because the figure is constantly changing, literally with each frame, so the amount of work that must have gone into this was excruciating. It seems like every time the figure was moved, the artist smoothed out the limbs, making it appear that the “skin” was glistening. It’s truly amazing to watch.

Another heavy-themed one here. I was interested in how some things are incredibly detailed, like the grocery store scene, and other things not so much, like the characters themselves (they’re just fuzzy limbs with small eyes and eyebrows).

This is a fun one, a break from the dark ones I’ve shown so far. This mixes “reality” with play as the ingredients and utensils are also pieces to games. This one has more of a stop-motion feel to it, probably because there are fewer frames per second.

This one uses real people and integrates it with normal filmmaking. Generally, when you think of stop-motion, you think of animation but it can be done in “real life.”

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CREATE

Using everything that I’ve learned thus far about animation, I developed two ideas for a stop-motion animation piece.

This first one follows a linear format and depicts the story of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Starting at the left side of the screen as eggs on a leaf, the caterpillar hatches and crawls to the right, where it climbs a stem and creates a chrysalis. After showing the passage of time through the sun and moon setting several times, the chrysalis hatches to reveal the butterfly. The concept is simple, which I think is perfect for creating stop motion for the first time.

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My second idea is a nonlinear story that depicts the day in the life of someone through their feet. It will begin and end in the same place, following the “bookending” story format. This one will definitely take a lot of time and coordination, and while I love the idea, I don’t think it would be wise to do this as my first one.

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