Cheap Software Tools Give New Life To Stop-Motion Animation

An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times reports that a wide variety of new stop motion animation tools are making it simpler to create stop-motion movies. The new tools are helping animators run more than three times faster than they did just a few years ago. Some even say that stop motion is cheaper than computer generated animation. Tools like Dragon Stop Motion, Stop Motion Pro and iKitMovie are just a few of the tools that are reinvigorating the space."

Uhhh... Yeah

[Monkeedude1212]

Some even say that stop motion is cheaper than computer generated animation

Well yes - that's why when computers were invented we didn't instantly switch to CGI for our movies, it took time to come around - Stop motion has ALWAYS been cheaper.

The problem is: It doesn't look as nice.

Cut out the director's and actors' Salaries from the movies, and guess which one had a higher budget: Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer or Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones.

Re:Apples & apples

[sznupi]

...and how many of us know people who thought Corpse Bride had to be CGI?

(I also knew some thinking the same thing about Sony Bravia San Francisco bouncy balls commercial; and refusing to accept otherwise until linked to "making of")

Re:Uhhh... Yeah

[miserere nobis]

re: "doesn't look as nice". Actually, that isn't something you can say across the board. Filming physical models can often produce superior results. In fact, it takes a whole lot of work on a computer to produce something that looks half as good as simply taking a picture of a real-life object. I actually think a lot of the spaceship action in the original Star Wars movies looked better (where, of course, "better" is definitely a subjective, artistic judgment based on sense of "realism", sense of how much its look fits with the feel of the overall film and so on) than the newer ones which relied more on computer graphics. The difference isn't solely that CGI looks better (though it does in some cases-- think, say, a Godzilla monster, that would rely on a very difficult model or a person in a suit), but that you can do things with it that you can't do with a camera and a real scene, and that you can much, much more easily re-film a scene with slight adjustments.

Re:Uhhh... Yeah

[EdZ]

Because good stop motion and bad stop motion cost almost exactly the same: it's nearly entirely skill based (a good stop motion artist might even work faster than a bad one). Bad CG, however, is a lot cheaper than good CG, because a lot of steps are skipped or slimmed down. More tweening (fewer keyframes), simpler lower resolution textures, no normal maps, specular maps, bump maps, SSS maps, etc, simpler lighting to shorten render time, and so on and so forth.

The Caliris

[Schafer]

I know something of Jamie and Dyami, the brothers behind Dragon Stop Motion. Jamie and I were introduced by our sons on a bike ride in 2004.

Jamie has a long history of directing award-winning stop-motion animation, from music videos to Super Bowl ads. On top of his visual aesthetic skills, he has a long history of craftsmanship (builds his own camera motion systems, creates beautiful stereo-optical systems of glass, wood, and brass). I think the artistry runs in the family.

By the time he started working on "Dragon" for United Airlines, he had become fed up with the current state of stop motion support software, especially when it came to DSLR control. He took his concerns to his brother, Dyami, who began coding after hours to support Jamie's concept.

The interesting thing is that they were not in the same city. Dyami would code new features (including hardware control via poorly-documented APIs) and, if needed, debug with Jamie over the phone. I have run large teams of very good developers, but very few are so good they can do that type of work efficiently. Talking with Jamie at the time, he said little debug was required; he would conceive of a feature one day and would have code in production the next.

Dragon has since become the brothers' primary focus. When my 10-year-old expressed interest in stop motion, we purchased one of the first copies of Dragon. I expected it would take days for me to start using, and then I would have to teach my son a limited subset of the features. Nope--he picked it up on his own and had his first few seconds of animation that afternoon. (He now keeps his whole SM kit in a backpack so he can shoot at friends' houses after school.) Tools like onion-skinning and short sequence playback made a great difference in the quality of his work.

It says a lot about Jamie's vision and UI expertise that the same tool used for multi-million-dollar movies can also be effectively used by a child. Combined with the stability provided by Dyami's top-notch coding, we couldn't be happier with Dragon. I wish them the best.

Re:Uhhh... Yeah

[LBt1st]

That's like predicting that people will stop painting because we have applications like Painter.