A curious case of stop-frame animation
July 16, 2007 – 8:39 pmStop-frame animation involves shooting an entire video using only a still photograph camera, and then painstakingly selecting a sequence of stills (a few thousand for a few minutes of footage) and ‘playing’ them in quick succession so the end result looks like a twitchy video. That’s in fact exactly what stop-frame animation is: a video with a bad case of nerves.
Not only does this technique – also referred to as pixilation – often look quite snazzy, but one can also easily create visual illusions just by leaving out certain frames that in a normal video would have been logically required. Lost? Watch the first video at the bottom of this post and see how the technique is used to good effect to create the illusion of the actor seemingly gliding across the ground. How’d they do this? Easy, just leave out the frames where he’s actually taking steps.
The video, titled Just Cruisin and created by MyVideo member niceonesteve, took two weeks to capture and another two weeks to edit. “I loved shooting it, every frame of every second, there are about 2500 of them in there somewhere,” he says.
Another great example of what can be achieved with stop-frame animation was a television advert produced for MTN by The Jupiter Drawing Room called Love Story. This clip (see second video below) is made up of 3952 still photographs and shows how pixilation can be used to structure a sequence of still photographs to form an interesting narrative characterised by funky effects.
Tags: Animation
