Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi. My name's Laura Tofarides and I'm a professional stop motion animator. I've been animating professionally since 2014 on a number of features, shorts, commercials, and TV series. I've worked with directors such as Nick Park and Wes Anderson, and I also work as a stop motion puppet maker. My work has taken me all over the world. By the end of this class, you'll know how to animate fire and smoke in a number of different mediums, as well as how to set up your shoot space. I'm going to talk you through all the equipment and materials that you're going to need. You're going to use these skills to set fire to an object inside your house, animated, of course. I'll also be showing you how to export and share your work with us on Skillshare and Instagram. Throughout this course, I'm going to be doing physical demonstrations as well as screen casting so that you can clearly follow along with the whole process and you absolutely cannot get lost. This course is great if you love stop motion and you want to up your animation game or your production values. It's also great for any beginners because I'm going to be taking you through the process step-by-step, how to animate with a smart phone. If you have any other stop motion software, then you can absolutely follow along with that as well. The skills you'll learn in this class can be used to add another layer of depth and realism to your short films, as well as add another skill to your Showreel. You can also use these techniques to really jazz up your social media so you can use them on Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. These techniques are great for businesses because it enables you to show off your products online in a really eye-catching way. If you have a product that is fire, why not show it actually on fire? We're going to be covering a lot, but I'm going to be breaking up into short videos for you guys so that it's really easy to follow along and digest. I'm available to you guys to answer any questions that you might have, so just stick them in the Discussions tab and I'll be super happy to help. Don't forget to click the follow button and that way you'll know when I post a new class or if I have any exciting news to share. You can also follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Lauratofarides. You can follow along with any new projects that I have or any work in progress that am posting. If you want to tag me, then just please use the hashtag Lauratofteach. So let's get started.
2. Finding Inspiration: The project for this class is animate and object on fire. I chose this project because it's pretty simple animation to begin with, but it's really effective, so it's pretty good for beginners. I also chose this project because you don't need to buy anything special to do it. You can do some stuff that's already lying around your house. Along the way, you'll also learn studio setup and how to shoot animation on your phone, and you won't even realize that you learn it. All these [inaudible]. I also chose his project because it's funny. I've animated fires on different phones before, and it's a really fun element to allow directors to show off their individual style. Here are some examples of fire and smoke in stop motion productions. You can see that PES uses candy corn for his fire because he's known for his playful objects animation. Wes Anderson is known for using in camera methods for his stop motion productions. Things such as camera gels and sweet wrappers are used along with cotton wool balls with smoke. This fits in with the aesthetic of the overall film. In this clip from Chuck Steel, you can see that the fire has been composited in. This is because they are going for more of a live action film look and more of a realistic aesthetic. You can see that the style and the intensity of the fire is dictated by the setting in the story. There's little fires for candles and matches, and then if a big roaring and furnace, you'll be using bigger, more intense flames. I'll be showing you how to do both of these. There's no right or wrong way to do this project. A big part of it is going to be experimentation and seeing what works on camera, what works for you and to have lots of fun along the way. The first thing you're going to do is to choose your inanimate object. You could use a pot, a mug, toiletries, a candle, a rubber duck, cereal, a photo of your enemy, a magic lamp, toys, or a particular medium on patient pet. Actually don't do that. They're just going to walk off mid-shot. It doesn't really matter what your object is, the weirder the better. Just let your imagination run wild. Once you've chosen your object, please post a photo of it in the project tab. That way we can see what you picked and to help inspire every one else. Once you have done that, it's time to move to the next lesson where l will be showing you what equipment you'll need. See you in there.
3. Equipment: In this class, I'm going to show you what equipment you'll need to make your fire animations. As I said before, you can totally do this class if you have dull and dragging frame. But I'm going to show you what equipment you need to shoot with your phones. There's some essential stuff that you'll need to do this project and some other things which aren't essential but nice to have it easier, but you can totally do it without it. I'd say the only essential things you'll need a smartphone with the ability to access the internet so that you can download the stock mission Studio App and some desk lamps. Here's an optional stuff that might help. A tripod or mini tripod with a phone holder attachment is quite useful. I use this cheap mini tripod that I got off eBay for less than five pounds and lighting kit. So I got this one from eBay for about 35 pounds, which made sense for me because I am using it to fill my skill cross at the moment. These also have a nice diffusion layer to even out the light. But like I said, you totally don't need to buy these. You can absolutely get away with just using desk lamps. If you want to diffuse the light on a desk lamp, then you could use tracing or baking paper, I'm just stick it onto the lap-p. Another thing that I'll use later on which you don't need but can make it look nicer. Are these mini candles or LED lights, which I got from Amazon. I'll show you how to use them later for some in camera lighting effects. I think that's it for equipment. So head on into the next lesson where I'll be talking about what materials will be using.
4. Materials: In this class, I'll show you what materials I'll be using to make my fire animations. These aren't hard and the fast rules, they are just what I've used, but feel free to experiment and see what works for you. There's nothing to say that you can't start out with these materials and then try out other ones later. I will use a big piece of paper and masking tape to make a curved background. Blue tack or white tack for securing objects or your mini triporter set, UHU glue for sticking layers of fire together, or you could use Pritt Stick or PVA, some Plasticine play in fiery colors, yellow, orange and white card, and lighting gels or sweet wrappers in red, orange and yellow. I use lighting gels which give a flatter appearance. Whereas sweet wrappers can be crinkled up to look more like crackling fire. You'll also need some random household objects to set fire too. These are the materials that I am going to use, but feel free to swap some out or change it up as you go. I've added links to where I got my materials and equipment in the resources tab, so check that out. I'll see you in the next lesson where I'll show you how to set up your studio.
5. Studio Set Up: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to set up your studio to optimize it for stop-motion. First of all, you're going to want to find a sturdy table or surface to shoot on. You're going to want to be able to control the light in your shoot space. Ideally, you want somewhere where you can close the curtains and shut off all natural light. The reason for this is that natural light will change throughout the day and you'll be able to see this in your finished animation, and it will read as a flickery movement and we don't want that. You'll then want to light your scene with indoor lights. Stuff like overhead lights or desk lamps or studio lights, If you have them. You got to want to avoid fluorescent lights, however, because they will cause flicker in your animation. You can use plain, or colorful papers as a background. This will help to transport your viewer out of your living room and into the world that you've created. Now it's time to set up your camera. If you're using a DSLR and Dragonframe, then that's great but if you don't have those things, then don't worry because I'm going to show you how to use your smartphone. First of all, put your chosen object in your frame so that you can frame up to it. You're going to want to keep your camera or your phone steady the whole time. Because if it's not secured, then it's going to wiggle around while you're shooting and it will look like the whole frame is shaking. Ideally, you're going to want to use something like a tripod or a GorillaPod but don't worry if you don't have those because I have some tricks to keep your phone steady. If you are using a tripod, it's a good idea to secure the feet, if you can. When we are on set, we usually glue the tripod to the floor using hot glue and then we'll also hot glue wooden kit guards around it. Just in case I accidentally kick it, it minimizes the risk that I'm actually going to move the camera. You probably don't want to use hot glue directly on the floor in your house though. But you can use something like masking tape or gaffer tape and then you can hot glue the tripod directly onto that and then it shouldn't damage your floor. Obviously, you can't do this on carpet though. The best thing to do is to not kick the tripod. If you're using a phone, you could prop it up against books, boxes, or even a mug. Elastic bands are also super-useful to attach your phone to something sturdy. I've seen people use clothes pegs, bulldog clips, or even plasticine balls to keep their phone steady. There's a million ways to do this, so just have a play around and see what works for you. It's also important to make sure that your phone is fully charged or even better, you could plug it in to make sure that you're not going to run out of battery mid-shot. Once you've chosen how you're going to secure your phone, then head on into the next lesson where I'm going to show you how to use the stop-motion studio app. See you in there.
6. Using the App: In this class, I'm going to be showing you how to use the stop motion studio app, and doing a little test animation. First of all, go to the App Store or the Play Store, and search for stop motion studio. Then click Install. I use this app sometimes when I'm onset, and I just need to test something small and I don't want to go through all the hustle of cooling in a camera system, setting up a new take. It's actually really useful for that. I did some research and I had quite a lot of trial and error with other apps, but I was actually pleasantly surprised with this one. It has a lot of features, especially in the free version, which is the one that we're going to be using today. At this point, I'd recommend that you turn the internet off on your phone or even put it into flight mode. This stops you from getting lots of notifications and messages that might distract you. It also means that you won't have to move your phone if you get a call or reply to messages because that would ruin your take. You'd have to start all over again and that would be doom. Being in-flight mode also has the added benefit of making your battery last a lot longer. I'm actually using my old phone to animate on. It doesn't have a Sim card in it, but I can still access the Wi-Fi in order to download the app and to share the video when I'm done. To minimize camera shake, you can actually use your headphones to take a frame. Use the kind of headphones that has the little button that you use to answer calls with. This means that when you're taking a frame, you're pressing the button on your headphones instead of touching your phone directly. This just minimizes the risks that you'll accidentally knock your phone off place mid shot, which would also be doom. Okay, it's time to open the app. This is the first screen you'll come to. So click new movie. On this next screen you're going to go to settings and you'll see a bunch of options pop up on the bottom of the screen. The first option to change is the FPS, meaning frames per second. We want to set this to 25. So I'm going to quickly explain about frame rates, doubles and singles. So that's 1s or 2s. We're going to be shooting on doubles, which means that you'll actually take two pictures every time you want to capture a frame. If we were to set the frame rate to 12 FPS, then that would mean you just have to capture one image and it would have the same effect. The reason that we're shooting at 25 FPS is because it's industry standard here in the UK. In America, it's 24, but it doesn't make a huge difference. It's important to start working in the correct frame rate because it will give you an understanding of motion later on. We're going to be shooting on doubles, i.e, holding the same image for two frames, because it's a much quicker and easier way to shoot. So it's also easier to learn this way. Doubles are used on most stop-motion TV series, and Ottoman shoot their films that way as well. It gives that cartoony stop-motion feel to it. Shooting on singles is usually reserved for feature films. It creates a much smoother look, but it is literally double the amount of work. So you're having to shoot 25 frames per second as opposed to 12 frames per second. So here's an example of a shot that I did. You can see that the block, which is a test, is shot on doubles and then the actual tape was shot on singles. You could also shoot on something like folds, which would look much chunkier. Basically the lower the frame rate, the chunkier the animation is going to be. Then the higher the frame rate, the smoother the animation is going to be. So I learned to shoot on doubles, but then my first job was actually on a feature film. So I had to very quickly learn how to shoot on singles. This is really good practice because now I can work either on singles or doubles, or even use both in the same shop if it requires it. But in this class, we're going to be shooting on doubles. Okay, so let's go back to the settings. So you're going to want to choose which aspect ratio to shoot at. 16 by 9 is standard widescreen, and that's what it automatically chooses. If you're shooting specifically for Instagram, you can choose the square option as well. Of course, you could always crop your 16 by 9 video down to a square in the Instagram app. But you do risk cutting off some of your animation if you weren't shooting with this in mind. If you were shooting for Instagram stories, then it makes more sense to set it to 16 by 9 and turn your phone portray. Only do this if you're specifically shooting for Instagram stories though, because this is a pretty weird aspect ratio and it's not super useful in other contexts. So I'm going to choose to shoot minus 16 by 9, but I'm going to keep the animation broadly in the center of frame. So I have the flexibility to crop it square later on if I want to, or keep it up full wide screen for something like YouTube. You can also choose which video quality to shoot in. Some features are only in the paid version. So I'm going to choose to shoot HD and then click done. So now we're going to click on the camera icon, and we can frame up. Click the m icon to bring up some more useful settings. The default is auto focus, but we don't want that because it might adjust the focus or exposure between frames, and that will be a noticeable glitch in the finished animation. You want to change it to AL and tap on the screen where your object is. This will focus the image and also lock in the focus and exposure so that it won't change much shop. Alternatively, you could click p, which will lock the focus but allow you to change the explosion at wide balance. You can click on this sun icon if you want to change the exposure. This will allow you to lighten or darken your image. You can also turn the screen grid on and off here, if that helps you. I'm going to leave off for now. Now at times do little animation tests to see how it all looks in action. So grab something nearby, and make an animated movie across the screen. It doesn't really matter what your objectives right now, because it's just a test. So you should place your object to one side of the screen and take two pictures because we are working on doubles. You'll now be able to move the slider on the left side of the screen. This will show you an onion skin layer of your previous frame. Also, if you chose the square crop for Instagram, those guides will show up when you move this slider. So you should keep moving your objects a little bit and then taking two frames and keep moving it until you've reached the other side of the screen. Now you can hit the play button, and watch your animation come to life. Magic. If you made any mistakes in there where you can see your hand, for instance, then just scroll through the timeline until you find those frames and click delete. You can also copy paste individual frames. Or if you click select, then you're able to select multiple frames and copy, cut, delete or paste them. Success. You've finished your first animation tests. Now let's move on to the next lesson where we're going to animate fun stuff. Fire, see you in that.
7. Animating Fire: In this class, I'm going to show you how to animate a number of different files in different mediums using replacement animation. I'll show you how to animate a crackling campfire,a flickering candle, and a big out of control funnel. Will be using lighting gels, oh, sweet wrappers, paper and plasticine clay. What is replacement animation? Replacement animation is where you swap out the whole puppet, or part of the puppet instead of moving the whole thing. It's commonly used for mass replacements to save time rather than having to sculpt each expression. Morph is an example of a character that sometimes uses whole body replacements because it's quicker to premake a load of reusable moves walking than it is to move and resculpting every frame. It can also be used to make special effects such as transformations or what we'll be using it for, which is to make flickering fire effects. Will start off making a regular campfire using lighting gels, but it's also works really well with colorful cellophane sweet wrappers. Here I have some lighting gels. I didn't have a yellow one, so I improvise with this yellow piece of plastic bag. First of all, you want to cut out rough five shapes with scissors. Remember, it doesn't have to be perfect. Stop motion animation is a representation of reality through our autistic lens. For the first one, you can play around with the layers and make alterations to see what layer you want where and how this alters the look of your file. Once you're happy with the shape, then glue your layers together. Here I'm using uhu all purpose glue, but you could probably also use something like [inaudible] or PVA. When I'm making the next replacement, you can see that I'm holding the first shape up to the one I'm cutting. This is to ensure that I'm cutting it to be a similar shape to the first one. Try making about three replacements. You should cut the same number of peaks on each replacement. It doesn't matter if the peaks vary in shape a bit, but they should be roughly the same size. Once you have at least three, let's get these onset to see what they look like. First off, place your chosen objects onset. I've gone for a bottle of hot sauce. I'm using white tack to stick it to the floor to prevent it from moving about too much. I'm also using a small amount of red plasticine on top of the bottle to have something to push the fire replacements into to hold them in place. Now it's time to put your first replacement on and take your first frame, which means taking two pictures remember. Now, turn on your onion skin using the slider. Spoke your fire out for the next replacement and take a frame. Because this is a crackling campfire. It will move around a bit, but it will stay roughly in the same place. Keep shooting through your placements until you have around 25 frames. Fire is something which is quite easy to loop. Go to your timeline and select all of your frames, then copy and paste them a few times until you have around 75 frames, which is three seconds and then play it back. You should have a chilled out cozy campfire animation. Now let's move on to the candle. For the candle replacements, I'm going to use paper. They're going to be more similar in size and shape to each other than the replacements for the campfire were. This is because it's a smaller flame, so it won't move around as much. Basically, we're altering the intensity of the flame by making the movements between each frame smaller. The reason we're using replacements is to give that very small amount of movement of flicker, which will bring it to life. First off, I drew and then cut out my basic shapes in yellow. Next I took a darker orange color and made shapes to stick on the back of the flame. This makes it look cooler at the top. Then I took some white card and cut out some shapes for the lower middle section of the flame. The White makes it look white hole at the center. Once you're happy with all your layers, then you should glue them together as before. You can see the middle three shapes are pretty much the same size. That's because I'm able to use those three shapes to loop the flame. You should always make at least three shapes if you want a flicker effect because two just looks like a glitch or a mistake. It's a good idea to number your replacements if like these, they go in a specific order. Shapes 3, 4 and 5 are my main replacements, which I can infinitely loop because they don't change size. Shapes 1 and 2 are a little shorter and fatter than my main three shapes. One is the shortest while two is a bit taller and more similar to number 3. Number 6 and 7 are a little bit taller and thinner than the main three shapes. Seven is the tallest while six is a bit shorter and more similar to the main three shapes. The reason for doing this is it means you have more shapes to animate with. I'll be able to make the candle dance up and down as well as side-to-side. Let's try these out onset. You can use the same object as before or you can use a different object if you want to. I'm going to use this frankenstein candle, blue tack or white tack works quite well to hold the paper in place. It's basically the same as before, you put your first replacement on, take a frame, then put on your onion skin. As I said, you want the movements between frames to be smaller here, this will have the effect of making the flame more controlled. Just try to line up the next replacement with the previous one that you can see on the onion skin layer. It's more important to line up the base of the flames, it's okay if the top pop moves around. First of all, I'm going to shoot my main three shapes, so that's 3, 4 and 5. This means I can copy paste them later to have a longer intro. Then I'm going to swap between the other shapes, making the flame dance around up and down, as well as side-to-side. I end the animation by shooting shapes 3, 4 and 5 again, so that hopefully it should loop when we copy paste it. Now you can hit Play to see your animation comes live. I'm going to loop this to make it longer by selecting the frames. Then I'm going to copy them and paste and paste again. Now hit Play and you should have a nice flickering candle animation. Now let's move on to the final one, a big out-of-control fire. For this fire I'm going to be using plasticine modeling clay. You can use any of these materials for any fire. I'm using different ones so that you can see the different methods and then you can choose yourself which ones you like the best. I'm using a neon yellow and orange, and a regular red color from the newplast range. You can use any modeling clay though it doesn't have to be newplast. The first thing you going to do is to warm it up by kneading it in your hands a bit. Just squish it and roll it around. Then start to pinch in sculpt to spiky 5 e-shape. The shapes don't have to be perfect. They're literally only on screen for two frames before we switch to another one, which is about enough time to register the size, shape, and color, but you really won't see much else. You can layer different colors on top of each other, or you can smear them, into great different effects. This is how I've made mine, but you can make yours in a completely different style it's totally up to you. You can see that this time I'm not measuring the shapes against each other. I'm making totally different shapes because the more irregular they are, then the faster they'll seem to move and this makes it look more intense and out-of-control. It's the opposite to what we were doing with the candle, where we wanted the shapes to be really similar to make subtle movements. Here, we don't want subtle movements, we want crazy wildfire. You can make as many different shapes as you want, so long as you have at least three. Now I have a bunch of different shapes and it's time to shoot them. Again, you can use the same object as before or pick a new one. I chose this charming spiky plant. You know the drill by now, place the fire on set, take your frame, turn on onion skin and shoot. To make the five stand up, I just squish it against the table to give it a flat bottom. Because you want the fire to feel more out-of-control you should pick more contrasting replacements because the more it moves around between frames, the wilder the animation will look. Now, copy paste those frames and mark your masterpiece burn. Bonus step, I think you'll agree this looks pretty awesome by itself, but there's one more thing we can do to make it look extra special. You can get these mini electric candles pretty cheap from home stores,or these LED lights come from Amazon. They're perfect for some easy in camera lighting effects. Just place them somewhere hidden from camera pointing at your fire. That little bit of extra light really helps to sell the effect. The LED won't even allow you to change the color of the light so that you can alternate between some [inaudible] to make the light flicker between the frames. It works especially well with the sweet rapper or letting gel method because the light can pass through the material and really illuminate the whole thing. These fires are looking fabulous, but they're missing one final thing, the smoke. Head on into the next lesson, I'll show you how it's done.
8. Animating Smoke: In this class, I'm going to show you how to add smoke to your fire for a little finishing touch. Now every fire requires smoke, but I think it makes it look more impressive. I'm going to show you how to turn cotton wool balls into stop-motion smoke. Felting roll also works great for this. The kind you use for needle felting. First of all, grab your cotton wool balls and start to unwrap them, then you should tease them apart to make them thin and wispy. If you want to color your cotton wool then just using a sharpie can add a bit of extra depth and make it look more smoky. If you're using felting wool, then you can partially mix a few colors together to make it look smoky. Once you've colored you're wool, then you should rub it together to mix it through. You should try to make the smoke fit your fire. It's going to be most applicable to the big fire because actually produce a lot more smoke than the camp fire, and the candle burn produce much at all until you blow it out. It's time to see what the smoke looks like on set. I've placed my skull mug on set and secured it with some white tack. We're going to regard smoke using fishing line or invisible thread. You should use one long piece of fishing line and fold it in half. Stick one end to the set behind your fire and the other end to something rigged above your set, or you can tape it high onto the wall behind to create two parallel lines. Having two lines is important because if we only use one, then the wool would just spin around it and it would make it more difficult to control. You could also attach your fishing wire in a V-shape and this pull help to prevent the wool from sliding down. You should attach the wool by wrapping them around both lines and rubbing them together until they felt to themselves. If you having trouble getting the wool to stick to the lines, then you could use something like Pritt stick. Just run it up and down the fishing line which will leave a little bit of stickiness on them, which will be enough to grip onto the wool. Now we're to animate the fire and the smoke at the same time. I'm also going to be using the mini lights that I showed you earlier. Just like we did before, we'll take our face frame and then turn on onion skin. Now every time we swap up the fire, we should also move the smoke up the fishing line simply by sliding it up. This will create a small gap at the bottom and we just fill that by adding more cotton as we go, and this will make it look like a continuous column of smoke. You should keep animating the fire and smoke until you have at least 25 frames. It's quite a good idea to animate in a setting order, and then that way you won't forget anything. Here I'm swapping the fire first, then changing the color of my lights, and then I'm moving the smoke. I'm making quite big movements with my smoke so that it moves quickly because it's a big fire. If you want it a slower smoke from a smaller fire, then just reduce the amount you move each time. Now hit play and watch your finished animation. I think this is looking great. Head on into the next lesson and I'll show you how to share your amazing animation skills with the world.
9. Sharing: In this class, I'm going to show you how to share your animation to Instagram and Skillshare. First off, I'll show you how to share to Instagram. Go to the Stop Motion Studio app where you have all of your animations. Hold down on the thumbnail of the one you want to export, then click on the ''Share Icon'' and click ''Export Movie''. Scroll down until you find Instagram and tap on that. The app will now export your animation. Once it's done that, it should open the Instagram app where you can change your crop, add filters, and write a description. Remember that you can at me if you want and tag it hashtag lauratofteach and hit ''Share''. Now to share it to Skillshare. You can't share directly from mobile, so you should hold down the thumbnail as before. Click the ''Share Icon'', and then click ''Export Movie''. Here you can either upload it to YouTube or Vimeo. If you don't have those, then I'll show you how to get the file to send to your computer. So click ''Save As'' which will download the video to your phone. Once it's downloaded, you should name it and click ''Done''. You'll find your file in the downloads folder. From there, you should email- it to yourself to get it onto a tablet or desktop. Now from your computer you can upload it to Skillshare as a GIF, you should go to a GIF making web sites such as GIPHY dot com. Drag and drop your file and hit ''Upload''. Then click ''Copy Link'' and copy the GIF link. Now you go to Skillshare. If you uploaded it to YouTube, then you can click this button here to upload. But we're uploading a GIF so click ''Other''. Paste your link and press ''Enter'' and your GIF will show up here. Now you can add a title and a cover image. Be sure to put the GIF in the main area of the project and not in the Upload Image section. This section is just the thumbnail that we can see when looking through everyone's projects. Once you're done, hit ''Publish''.
10. Final Thoughts: Hey guys, congratulations on making it to the end of the class. By now, you should have something that looks like my animation or something completely different. Together, we've walked through studio setup, how to shoot on your phone, and how to animate different kinds of fire. I really hope you enjoyed watching, and I hope you take away from this class that you don't need a bunch of expensive tech to get started in stop motion. It's now super accessible and is super fun to create. I'd love to see what you guys have made. Please upload it to the project gallery. Sharing is a great way to get feedback and also inspires everyone else. If you have any questions, then please post them in the discussions tab and I'll get back to you. If you enjoyed this Skillshare class, then please leave me a review and be sure to follow me on Skillshare. Thanks so much for taking my class and I'll see you next time.
