- #STOP MOTION ANIMATION HEADS ON DISPLAY MANUAL#
- #STOP MOTION ANIMATION HEADS ON DISPLAY SKIN#
- #STOP MOTION ANIMATION HEADS ON DISPLAY SERIES#
Now it seems like everyone has a digital SLR camera because they have quickly become more affordable for the average consumer.Īlong with this trend has been the realization that one can shoot stop-motion with a digital SLR camera.
#STOP MOTION ANIMATION HEADS ON DISPLAY MANUAL#
(I don’t even remember the last time I took a picture using film.) Then came the digital SLR camera (Figure 4.4), which had the appearance and image quality of the more professional film cameras, but allowed for manual controls and creative freedom in a digital universe. Tiny digital cameras that allow you to point, shoot, and get your pictures instantly for uploading to your computer, printing, or posting online have taken the world by storm. Gone are the days of taking pictures with a film camera, dropping off the tube of film at the drug store, and waiting an hour for your photos and negatives to be ready. Meanwhile, as Firewire outputs on computers and camcorders have become harder to find, there has been an explosion of popularity of digital SLR still cameras in the past few years.
#STOP MOTION ANIMATION HEADS ON DISPLAY SKIN#
Without a live feed, you cannot use the onion skin or frame-toggling features that frame-grabbing software allows you to take advantage of to help keep your animation registered. However, for stop-motion it presents a problem because a USB connection from these cameras (Figure 4.3) will not provide you with a live feed for your frame grabber. This is all fine if you are shooting home videos of your friends, your kids, or your cat playing the piano for YouTube. More and more standard hard-drive camcorders also shoot in HD, which is quickly becoming standard for all broadcast media. From there, you can burn your videos to DVD or upload them straight to YouTube. Flip Video cameras operate on the same principle, allowing you to shoot video easily in the palm of your hand and upload movies as AVI files directly to your computer.
Video camcorders at average consumer prices (or higher) now typically shoot movies onto a hard drive, and a USB connection is used to transfer the video off the camera. However, even though Firewire cards and converters are still on the market for installing into computers, most video cameras no longer come with the Firewire output or cable included. Of course, some software does have frame averaging and HD capabilities to help with this.ĭespite these challenges to work around, using a live Firewire feed is still a perfectly valid way to shoot stop-motion. Watching the animation play back on a computer monitor might look fine, but if it is meant to be blown up on a huge screen at a film festival, the image quality might not be as strong as it should be. However, even with an HD camera and frame averaging provided to improve the quality of each frame, the image being fed into the computer is essentially a compressed image, and there may be limits to how much resolution can be attained for high-quality broadcast. The flexibility of this method provides instant access to the images for preview purposes and playback. The software then grabs separate still images from the live feed each time the animator hits the capture button. The video camera basically acts as an “eye” and feeds a constant live image into the software, so if one moves a hand into the frame, this should all appear in real time on the computer monitor as well. Looking at the strip of film itself, all of the separate images are visible, so an editor can see exactly where scenes begin and end, and the images can be re-arranged and spliced together.Īs film use declined over the years and was replaced by video, the most popular method for stop-motion became using a MiniDV camcorder with an IEEE-1394 Firewire connection (Figure 4.2) that provided a live feed to a computer with frame-grabbing software.
#STOP MOTION ANIMATION HEADS ON DISPLAY SERIES#
The result of the whole process was basically a series of still images on the strip of film that would exist only in negative form until it was sent to a lab to create the positive print. There was no way to make sure each frame was consistent with the next one. These elements would essentially be a continuous tone, and the features on a film camera could be set manually, although fluctuations could happen because of uneven shutter speed, changes in temperature, or the film moving around in the gate. Each image was essentially a separate photograph with its own established focus, exposure, color, and lighting. Then, the sprockets inside would advance the filmstrip to the next unexposed space for the next image to be captured. Exposing one frame of film with the touch of a button would open the shutter and expose light through the lens onto the film. The film would be registered with a series of sprockets that push the strip of film through a gate in front of a square window blocked by a shutter.
When stop-motion was shot on film, each frame would exist as its own separate image, strung together on a strip of 8mm, 16mm, or 35mm film (Figure 4.1).
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