Toys Come to Life

Have you ever felt that some of the toys in your room are alive? Odds are I can make that happen using stop-motion animation. Stop-motion animation is a filming process used even in big-budget films. Stop-motion animation takes normal objects, and with a camera, makes them come to life. There are three main steps in animation: getting all your materials together, filming and the last part is editing.
The entire animation process is divided up like a cake: the materials are the base, filming is the main part, and editing is like the frosting because it ties the entire thing together. Stop-motion animation is a filming tool used by many great directors, like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The first thing you will need when making a movie using stop-motion is something to film. You need something that will stand up on its own while you film because you cannot have your hand on the materials while filming. I like to use legos because they stand up on their own and are very sturdy. If you want to film, you need a good digital camera, something that can handle all the information you will put in it. The next step is the main part and it is the filming process. This process requires skill and attention to detail. You start with your character in front of the camera and you take a picture. After the picture you move you character ever so slightly and take another picture. Repeat this process over and over until you are satisfied with the movements you have made your character make. You may have been exposed to stop-motion and not even known it. There are many examples in early movies. The space battles in Star Wars are great examples of professional animation. In addition, all animated movies you have ever seen are stop-motion animation because animated movies are just lots of pictures played together in sequence. The last stage and probably the most fun is the editing stage, where you take all your pictures and put them together into a movie. In editing you have to take all your pictures from the digital camera to the computer, which anybody should know how to do. Once you have your pictures, you need a good editing software so you can put all your pictures in order and make the movie. For Windows computers you can use Windows Movie Maker, and for Macs, iMovie works great. If for some reason your computer does not have an editor, there are many on the internet that are great to use. In the editing software you put the time that you want each picture to run. There are many run-times, such as fifteen frames-per-second, or longer. I have found that the shorter the run-time is, the better the animation looks. In the editing stage you add voices, which add another level of reality to your film. The best part of editing is special effects, like fire or rain. These make your movie that much better, and I have found that it is worth the effort. The last part of the entire process is sharing your film with the world. It is very rewarding when someone likes your film and complements you.
I am proud of knowing stop-motion animation because not very many people know it and it makes me feel good to know something that they do not know. This process is easy to learn but takes lots of practice, but when you get it down, it is very rewarding.