Interview

We interviewed a clay stop-motion animator named Marc Spess. He was very kind and helpful by answering all our questions. Here are his responses: 

What kind of softwares/apps do you use to create animations?
 1) The software I use for my animation is Dragonframe. It allows me to capture individual frames of animation, play them back and also turn the animation into movie files for editing. For editing I use Sony Vegas. You can put in your voice audio, music, sound effects, transitions and titles.

We currently use Flipagram, do you have a better software you would recommend? 
 2) I'm not aware of Flipagram, it looks like an editing program? The best programs are Sony Vegas and Adobe premiere. For the Mac I think IMovie is what most use.

What inspired you to become an animator? 
 3) My biggest inspiration was Will Vinton Studios (now called Laika) in Portland Oregon. They had popular animated characters like the California Raisins and Dominoes Pizza Noid. These were made of clay and on TV all the time when I was younger.

What style of stop motion animation is your favorite?
 4) My favorite style is clay animation which is the hardest kind of animation to do, because clay is heavy. But I love how the wax in clay makes figures look alive. Real skin is a little translucent and that's also why many famous artists sculpt figures in marble stone.

 Is stop motion animation your favorite kind of animation? If not, what kind of animation do you prefer?
 5) I love stop motion the most out of all forms of animation, but computer generated animation can also be beautiful to look at. However stop motion for me has a more realistic feel to it that draws me in more than other types of animation. Possibly because in stop motion everything is really there.

What type of cameras do you use or that you think are best to film/create the animation?
 6) I'm using a Canon 60D. It's a DSLR camera that can give you amazing images in your animation to work with for editing. However you can use anything from a web camera and even your cell phone camera with the right stop motion apps.

Do you have any tips in creating a set for a stop motion animation video?
 7) Some tips for making stop motion sets are to make the base of your set very strong. A very heavy table or using heavy wooden 2 by 4's prevent the set from moving when you animate. Also hanging heavy objects off of the bottom of your set prevents it from moving if you accidentally kick it. After the base of the set is built, the table area is best made out of MDF which stands for Medium Density Fiber board. It's a type of wood that doesn't splinter when you drill holes in it. Those holes are used to screw your puppets feet into so they won't fall over. The rest of the set can be made out of any material you can find. From cardboard, wood, plastic, plaster and styrofoam. Those are all common materials to make sets.

 How long have you been working in this field?
 8) I worked in the field of stop motion for several years as a freelance set builder, puppet maker and animator. Then I did my own films while creating animateclay.com so I could teach animation and animate too. My last short film was Zombie Pirate Tales.

Is there any suggestions for us to be able to make a more professional stop motion animation.
 9) To make really professional stop motion, study animation from different books as much as you can. Richard Williams has a very famous book called The Animators Survival Kit. There are also make YouTube videos on how to animate in stop motion. On the YouTube channel animateclay (this is my channel) I have tutorials on all these topics. One is on how to use a surface gage for stop motion. Surface gages help you to see where your puppet is in three dimensional space so when it moves you know exactly how far you move a puppet part. If you move your puppet parts in tiny moves for each frame, the motion appears slow. If you space the moves wide - the motion appears fast. Evenly spaced moves make the thing you animate move at one speed. Moving a part with tiny spaces first, wide spaces in the middle and tiny spaces at the end make the thing you animate look like it slowly became faster and then slow again.

Do you add your own music and sound effects to your creation? 
 10) For sound effects I usually go online to find those. There are a lot of what they call Royalty Free sound effects and music pieces you can download. One popular place to get free music that many stop motion animators visit is incompetech.com. Just google "free sound effects" and there are tons of sites. As long as you aren't making money off the sounds, most places will let you download them for free use. But as you get into making much bigger (commercial) productions, many people will record their sound effects in a process called foley. What they do is use their hands, bodies, tools and props to create the exact type of sound they need for specific shots. It's sometimes better to hire someone with experience in this. The other way is to buy sound libraries from people who record their sound effects and put them on data CD's, DVD's or hard drives. These can be very expensive but save a lot of time in making films.

What's Happening

Another part of stop motion animation is Silhouette Animation. It's basically a stop motion just you use shadows. This is a very hard one to conquer because you have to keep the shadow sill when taking the picture. However there is an easier way to accomplish it, some animators use dark black ink or make their characters digitally. Since we are new to this type we were thinking of making one with dark black construction paper. We still haven't planned out what the animation will be, for an example the object stop motion animation we had the wooden man going on a journey. If you have any ideas leave a comment below. But don't make it to complicated cause this is our first time trying it out. We also decided that we have to work on our lighting in our videos. So I plan to buy a desktop lamp so we have the same amount of lighting in all our shots. This may help us out more and I hopefully can buy a camera stand so we can have less movement in the shots. We sent an email out to a guy named Marc, who is a clay animator. He did respond saying he is willing to answer our questions, so we sent the questions. He hasn't respond yet, crossing my fingers he does. So this is so far where we are at. We are still trying to work with the wooden man model, but it needs some repairing. See you guys next time.

Failure

This week we tried to use a wooden figure for our object animation video. However we got a horrible model and it broke... twice. So this is the video we were able to make last week before it broke. It was one of our best outcomes and overall a success. With the app we are using we got the perfect lighting and efficient movement of the figure. The video is called the "Wooden Man's Journey."

View on Flipagram

This video is with the wooden man and we incorporated our phone animation from a few weeks ago. This is a preview because we haven't finished due to the break down of the wooden man. 

New Software!

We are coming up with an idea for our year long project. We didn't think the one we came up with before had a plot to it. So we decided to make a new one. We haven't fully deiced how it will go, so sadly that means I can't tell you it. However what I can tell you is, we are using a new software instead of flipagram. This software is called, Stop Motion Studio. The video i'm about to show you is going to be our last video we make with flipagram. Here it is:

View on Flipagram

Here is our iPhone stop motion animation. What we are trying to do is create a phone with the drawing stop motion animation technique. We traced the shape of an actual phone about 4 times and cut them out. We used on paper as a background and taped another on top of it, however we left the sides open. On the paper on top we cut out the middle to make it like a screen. Then with the two left over papers we drew a home screen and a lock screen. With those two papers we can slide them into the phone instead of erasing and redrawing every screen. It is hard to explain in words so when the project is completed we will post a video of how it all comes together.

View on Flipagram

In the beginning of the year our teacher explained that at some point in our project we would be required to have a interview. Because of this, today we mainly spent our Genius Hour time constructing an interview. We just made a list of 10 questions to ask the person we choose to interview about animation. Also during the end of the period we continued our iPhone stop motion animation video. In the following post we will include a picture of our progress in the new project and a brief description of what we are actually trying to do.

Week 7 (Example)

Today we are going to make a cutout stop motion animation. See the video above. Well we are going to do the same thing except instead of a girl we are going to make a phone. We just learned this simple method, so the video we will make is like a practice run. So next post we will show you our end result and what were our pros and cons with this type of stop motion animation.