Tech Tuesday: Stop-Motion Animation
Below, I’ve posted two of my early animations from September of 1990. They were done as stop-motion animation.
Basically, you shoot a frame, move your model a tiny bit, shoot the next frame, move the model, etc. Except, on my video camera, I don’t recall that I could film just one frame. I think it was basically a matter of how quickly you could press the button to start taping and press the button again to stop taping. Thus, the motion is even more choppy than it would otherwise have been just from my learning curve.
I’m not sure if I had a tripod then either. I am pretty sure I just set the camera on the dining room table, aimed at my little stage. You’ll notice that the camera occasionally moves because I must have moved it ever so slightly (or not so slightly sometimes, as you’ll see) when pressing the start/stop button.
Anyway, enjoy the animation, which is a bit lengthier than my computer-generated animations. And, be sure to stay tuned after the first fade-out. I’ve combined “Clayman” and “Clayman II” into a single video.
SPOILER WARNING: I think that Clayman II’s body (torso) may have been formed from what was left of Clayman. It looks like his body is brown, which is the color you get when you mix Clayman’s clay parts…
Oh, and I removed the sound. You don’t need to hear the clicking of the button, or my partial voice-overs. 
that was some of the funniest stop animation i’ve seen in a while. call me crazy but i liked it. you’ve inspired me to go get a camera and make stop animation films
Thanks.
And, unless you incorporate some live action like I did, you don’t even need a video camera to do stop motion animation. You can do it with a still camera, which will be easier to do one frame at a time, especially if your video camera doesn’t have a feature that lets you film one step at a time. You can take the still shots and combine them into an animation on your computer.
Very creative, interesting work =)
How did you manage to have time for doing this? it must be time consuming rite???
It was 18 years ago.
I think I was only working part-time then.
[...] I was inspired by (my own) Clayman video from the other day. Instead of trying to create complex things, I could just start simpler [...]