Introduction to Animation

INTRODUCTION TO ANIMATION 

VOCABULARY: The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) defines animation and stop-motion animation as follows: 

Animation: Frame-by-frame creation or capture of drawings, CGI models, puppets or objects, recording incremental changes in the subject. Played back at normal speed, the recorded manipulations create the illusion of movement and “give life to” what was previously static art.

Stop-motion animation: Creating the illusion of movement in a puppet by incremental “move and stop” frame-by-frame shooting. The recorded changes to the puppet’s poses “give life” to what was previously static art. This technique often uses clay or plasticine characters or puppets. Pixilation is a variation of stop-motion animation and is achieved by photographing the movement of humans one frame at a time. From: https://www.nfb.ca/playlist/stopmostudio/

Frame: one of many still images used in sequence to create animation

Think of Stop-Motion Animation like those flip-books you might have made as a kid:

So each page the character or object changes position a little bit so that when you flip through the book it becomes animated.

See an example of a student flip-book animation here: Sports Flip-Book

Stop-Motion Animation is quite similar, each frame is a photograph instead of a drawing on paper. The photos are then put together in sequence on a video editing program like Adobe Premiere Pro and played back to create animation. 

Remember in your History of Photography Web Hunt, the first motion picture presentation was in 1880 in San Francisco, California.  The photographer Eadweard Muybridge used sequential photographs of a horse galloping and projected them one after the other to make it animated, see the video here: Horse Galloping Eadweard Muybridge. This is the stop-motion process!

Today, Stop-Motion is still a very impressive filming technique, here is the trailer for Fantastic Mr. Fox from 2009: Fantastic Mr. Fox
Here is a list of Stop-Motion full-length films, many of which you may have seen!

Let's break it down.  Here's how to create a stop-motion film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHTQr0kfA98

You can use many objects to create a stop-motion film, here is one using clay: Video

Some student project examples: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkqDG4zsHtk (using play-doh)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clfhTsyEFjI (using action-figures)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xke-crWx_a4 (using drawings)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJEBbs9X6s4 (using cut paper)