Stop-Motion Test Shoot

Because one of my ideas for a music video for the track "One Week" is rather complicated, I think that it would be a good idea to test it out to see if it is possible to incorporate it into the music video. Here is my tutorial for shooting stop-motion animation with photographs.

1. Film the subject of the stop-motion. From experience, I know that this should be done at a higher shutter speed than normal (in my case, 60 fps) to reduce motion blur in the next stage.
2. Take stills from every Nth frame in the video. N can be worked out by using N=F/(P/2) where F is the Frames per second that the action was filmed at (60) and P is the Project's frame rate (24).
3. Print off the stills. For every second of stop-motion you want, print off P/2 stills (12).
4. Take two photographs of each still. Each pair of photographs should be as identical as possible, this is just done as opposed to slowing down the video so that it looks smoother.
5. Edit the photographs together. In the project, each photograph should only be shown for one frame. In theory, this should create a stop-motion animation with photographs without too much effort.

Partially following the tutorial above, I found three ways to do stop-motion animation with varying success. Below is a video made up of 4 short videos:

1. The original unedited footage of the drum I used to test this out.
2. Test with printed out stills of that footage photographed whilst moving the camera in to transition back into the original footage.
3. Test with printed out stills again but not moving the camera as much and not making the original footage cover the whole screen.
4. Test by taking stills from the original footage and showing them for more than one frame in editing.

In making these test videos, I have learnt several things to do if we do decide to use stop-motion in our project:

• When I imported the original footage into the project it fixed the frame rate for me so I just had to print off every other still.
• Printing off stills and taking photographs of those makes this project longer and more expensive as we would have to get them printed in high quality (for at least 9p each).
• It is a lot easier to take photographs and add those directly to the timeline or to edit high speed footage so that it looks like stop-motion.
• If photographs are going to be used, they should be taken with a good camera, if focus or exposure changes, it will be very obvious.
• There should not be very much movement between two frames of stop-motion; if the action and the camera both move, it will look very shaky and bad.