Animation small production

Do you know stop-motion animation? This may be more suitable for us to do at home.

Stop-motion animation, as its name implies, is to shoot objects one by one and then show them continuously, so as to make them look like living people or any strange characters you can imagine. What we usually call stop-motion animation is usually represented by clay figurines, puppets or mixed materials. The history of this animation form is as long as that of traditional hand-drawn animation, or even older.

Freeze-frame animation is a special animation form, which, together with hand-drawn animation and computer animation, constitutes three categories of modern animation. In the creation of stop-motion animation, the application of materials is always the biggest factor of film effect. The material is the main body of the film, from the simple material pendulum to the comprehensive material carving, and then to the numerical control shooting. After nearly a hundred years of development, the material application forms of stop-motion animation are constantly innovating with the progress of the times and technology, and the creative connotation of stop-motion animation is also constantly changing.

1907, an unknown technician invented the "frame-by-frame shooting method" for shooting scenes with a camera in the new york studio of Vitagraf Company in the United States. This wonderful method quickly caused a sensation in some early films. For example, in a haunted hotel (Stuart Blackton, 1907), a knife cuts sausages automatically, just like being manipulated by an invisible hand. In the wonderful fountain pen of 1907, a fountain pen is writing automatically.

production process

[Story and Script]

An attractive story is the basis of an animated film. Stop-motion animation is often not suitable for macro works with complicated plots because of its tedious production. A short story is likely to catch the audience without telling everything: as long as you have a good idea. The stage of pre-planning should be as long as possible. If you don't think about it, you will soon find yourself in a dilemma. Story board decided the position, time, scene changes, character movements of each shot, and even marked the sound effects and dialogue. It is an important tool for every animator. You don't need to draw a beautiful lens script, even if it is scribbled, but you can understand it yourself.

[shooting equipment]

Before the popularity of digital special effects, many special effects shots of movies were shot and produced in a case-by-case manner. There are also many cartoons that are actually stop-motion animations, such as elephants in Cao Chong, love between two generations and magical pens and horses. Because the traditional stop-motion animation is often shot with a film camera, the cost and production difficulty are unimaginable for ordinary people. Nowadays, with the development of digital technology, home DC or DV can also shoot stop-motion animation works with quite good quality, so more and more people begin to make their own stop-motion animation works.

DV: The resolution of a single frame picture is not as high as that of DC, but it looks more intuitive and easier to operate. Moreover, because firewire is directly connected to a computer, pictures can be collected at any time through software, which can fully meet the requirements of TV broadcast quality.

DC: The imaging quality is quite good, which can completely exceed the quality of TV broadcast. But it is relatively troublesome to operate, because you have to shoot the material and then import it into the computer to see the shooting results clearly.

[Required tools]

Freeze-frame animation often needs a distinct character image first, which can be a person, an animal, a thing, or of course an imaginary character. But if you plan to make a character, choosing the right tools and materials is the key to ensure the smooth production and shooting. We are familiar with clay, rubber, silica gel, soft pottery, gypsum, resin clay and so on, which can be used as the main materials for making characters.

Tools such as aluminum wire, propylene, model paint and sculpture knife are also commonly used materials in the process of making characters.

One of [Word Making]-Character Skeleton

Bones or joints are the second most important part of a character. Except for some very small or deformed plasticine characters, all the characters need skeleton support. After long-term practice, there are three kinds of commonly used bones: wire bones, spherical joint bones and mixed bones using the above two joints. Spherical skeleton is the most professional and very expensive, so only professional animation companies will use it. Metal wire is generally made of pure aluminum wire, which has excellent flexibility and is not easy to age and break. There is no elasticity at all, which is very suitable for the joints of the role. Usually, it is twisted into two strands to obtain ideal strength. Thick aluminum wire can be used to support the weight of clay in legs and prevent bending. The source of aluminum wire can be stripped from the aluminum wire with the cross-sectional area of 1.0-2.5 square mm on the market.

[Role Making] Part II-High Hardness Soft Pottery -B75- Robot

Robots are our favorite sci-fi images. This paper introduces a small robot for planetary exploration. Its appearance style is quite old-fashioned, the whole body is covered with rivets, and the eyes use ordinary flashlight beads. A battery box with two No.5 batteries is installed inside its body to supply power to its eyes, which can be turned on and off by a small switch on its back. Soft pottery materials can make very fine surface structure, and the strength after baking and hardening is also very ideal. In order to make the robot move flexibly, there are aluminum wire skeletons in the plastic pipes of the arms and legs. The shape of the hand does not use the "pliers" of ordinary old robots, but uses soft and flexible cartoon "gloves", which can make rich gestures. At the same time, the fuselage part adopts the structure that the upper and lower halves are made and reassembled separately, which brings convenience to battery replacement. The painting of robots is the "cast iron" method that we always like to use: first, paint the whole body with black acrylic pigment, and after thoroughly drying, dip a very small amount of silver pigment on the surface and gently sweep it, and many subtle textures will immediately present a satisfactory metallic texture.

[Scenes and Lights]

Your character must have an activity space, which can be your bedroom or a desk. However, in some demanding works, it is often necessary to build scenes. Scene building is like making a scaled sand table. There are many possibilities for making stop-motion animation: it may be realistic, it may be abstract, it may be very tasteful and rough, it may be very detailed and luxurious. Here, we made a small-scale "asteroid surface". A large number of foam plastics and plasticine constitute the scene, and the dim main light spreads a mysterious atmosphere to the scene.

Successful lighting arrangement can accurately indicate the time and create an atmosphere. Because of the particularity of cartoons, lighting can be more exaggerated and colorful than movies performed by real people. Almost any stable light source can be used except flashing fluorescent lamps.

[shooting and production]

The later stage of freeze-frame animation is exactly the same as traditional animation: the shot sequence is imported into the computer, merged into video clips in the software, and then the speed is adjusted on the time axis. Stop-motion animation is usually 2 beats per second (12 frames per second) or 3 beats per second (8 frames per second). After each shot is adjusted separately, all shots will be imported for final editing. The stunt synthesis part is completely completed in the computer, and the commonly used methods are blue screen keying, motion blur, hand-drawn stunt and erasure support.

Keying synthesis is a very traditional stunt, which is to shoot an object into a solid color (usually blue or green) first. Then shoot the background you need, then superimpose the two pictures together to remove the solid background, and finally get the composite picture, also known as color key technology. Today's PC can do this job, and commonly used video editing software such as Premiere has this function.

Edit output: First, connect DV and computer with 1394 "Firewire". You can easily capture frame by frame with computer editing software such as Adobe Premiere or Framethief on Mac, and then edit the output with Adobe Premiere.

[Edit Output]

First, use 1394 "firewire" to connect DV to the computer. Using computer editing software such as Adobe Premiere or Framethief on Mac, you can easily capture frame by frame, and then edit the output with Adobe Premiere.