Animating Food: A Stop-Motion Masterclass

1. Class Trailer: Ever wondered how to make food not just look delicious, but move, dance, or even tell a story. Hi, I'm Paul Lalo, co founder of Soy Milk Studio, and welcome to a world where food becomes your creative playground. In this course, we're going to turn your favorite ingredients into start motion stars. I'll show you how to take food from being just static to spectacular using simple, accessible tools, professional techniques, and a bit of imagination. You'll learn how to master the essential software dragon frame, along with tips and tricks for lighting, composition, and timing. And it won't stop there. I also take you through creative techniques like replacement animation, giving animate objects life, and animating in reverse for stunning effects. By the end of this course, you'll know how to bring even the simplest of ingredients to life. Food isn't just something we eat. It's something we can animate, transform, and reimagine. H. So, what are we waiting for? Let's make food come alive. One frame at a time. I'll see you in the course. 2. Getting Started: Welcome to the World of Food Animation: Mm hmm. Hello, and welcome to Animating Food, a Stop Motion master class. I am Paul Lalo, co founder of Soy Milk Studio animation studio based both in Australia and France. My partner, Jenny and I specialize in Stop Motion animation and motion design, creating bespoke videos for brands, institutions, and beyond. Stop. So a little bit about me first. I've always loved drawing, storytelling and animation. I was actually training in Australia as a Toti animator in the Disney style of frame by frame paper animation. However, as the industry shifted to digital animation, I found myself working more and more on computers. This led me to lose that initial connection to animation until one day, Stop Motion reignite that spark. And that's when things got really exciting for me. There's just something truly magical about bringing objects to life through Stop Motion. In this master class we'll combine two amazing worlds, food and animation. This fusion will allow you to transform everyday food into visually rich dynamic creations. I'm thrilled to show you how this medium can elevate your work as a photographer, food stylist, or content creator to the next level. To begin, let's quickly define what stop motion animation is. Stop Motion is a filmmaking technique where individual frames are captured and between each frame, the objects in the scene are moved slightly. When played back in sequence, these images create the illusion of movement. Think of it like flipping through a flipbook, for example, one of these. As you can see in this one, when I flip through each page, there's a slight change in movement in this bird, right? If I play quickly, we can see some animation. Start Motion has been around for a very long time, using everything from high budget feature films to TV commercials. But what's really exciting is how it has become versatile and popular in today's social media world. As content creators, it allows us to add magic and creativity to the ordinary. For instance, food can move, transition, and transform in ways that are impossible with other techniques like steel photography or traditional video, for example. W Stop Motion, you can bring recipes and ingredients to life. You can create playful engaging content, tell brand stories, and add a unique edge to your work. So what are we carving today? By the end of this course, my goal is for you to have a solid foundation for cutting your own food stop motion videos. So here's what's on the menu. First, we'll talk about the basics of stop motion with an overview of the principles and how they relate to animating food. I'll also show you a few top notch examples to get you inspired. Next, I'll introduce you to the essential tools and equipment you'll need. This includes cameras, lighting, and, of course, dragon frame. The software we'll be using today. Then we'll move into the shooting process itself. I'll give you tips and tricks for capturing smooth, seamless movements. I'll also show you a live demonstration of how to shoot various food stop motion scenes and how our principles discussed earlier come into play. Lastly, we'll finish with a bit of post production, how to edit your frames, adjust a tempo, and export the funnel video for sharing on your favorite platform. Alright. Now we've got the menu laid out. Let's roll up our sleeves and get things cooking. We've got some food to bring to life. Before we jump in, let's talk about an important topic frame rate. Frame rate, AKA FPS or frames per second refers to the number of individual images captured per second, FPS. In cinema quality stop motion, a standard frame rate is typically 24 frames per second, meaning 24 individual photos are taken for just 1 second of smooth animation. This is a lot of work. It creates a very natural look to our eyes, which are accustomed to seeing in real life. However, thanks to the persistence of vision, another important animation concept, we can achieve a pretty good result with half the frames and also half the work. That's why 12 FPS is often used in stop motion. Creating a slightly choppier stylized look that adds character and also charm to our animations. For this class, we will stick to 12 FPS. 3. Stop-Motion Essentials: Welcome to the world of Stop Motion. Since we're talking about Stop Motion in the context of food, then let's continue with our delicious analogy. If animation is like cooking up a meal, then just as every great dish needs the ingredients, every successful stop motion needs key principles to bring it to life. Let's break it down and discover our five key ingredients. Timing and spacing. Timing refers to how long an action takes, determining its speed. Fewer frames make movements fast while more frames slow it down. You can think of timing as your seasoning, too much or too little, and the whole flavor changes. You need just the right amount to make your animation smooth and engaging. A common beginner mistake is not taking enough pictures for a movement, resulting in an animation that is zipping by too quickly or just goes unnoticed. Remember our frame rate, 12 frames per second. We need those 12 frames to create 1 second of animation. A good habit is to think about how long an action should take or even time it out with a stopwatch to make sure you are not under or over animating. There are some pretty cool frame based stopwatch apps on your phone like this one here from Anime time, which I find particularly useful. With practice, timing will become second nature. Spacing is a distance an object move between frames. Wider spacing creates faster motion, while closer spacing makes it slower and smoother. So let's animate this pieces of candy as an example. The timing for all four candies is the same. 2 seconds or 24 frames at 12 FPS. As you can see, I'm using the same timing and spacing. Moving each piece of candy at the same increment, resulting in a constant or linear movement. But what happens if we change the spacing for each candy? I'll keep the top one as a constant spacing, but I'll make the second one start closer together and gradually increase the spacing, all while respecting our 2 seconds timing. The third piece here will speed up quickly, then decelerate to a slow stop. The last candy will start slow, spied up in the middle, and then slow down at the end. This gradual increase or decrease in spacing between frames is called easing in or easing out, also called slow in and slow out, another key principle of animation. Can you spot the differences between the candies? Their timing is the same, 24 frames, but their spacing varies greatly. I hope you can see how crucial both timing and spacing are when controlling motion. These two ingredients are by far the most important, and they always go hand in hand, just like salt and pepper. They both take a lot of practice to fully understand and master. So don't worry, just keep practicing. Arcs. In life, most natural movements follow a curved path or an arc, rather than just straight lines. Using arcs and animation creates a more fluid and realistic motion, mimicing a natural flow in physics of real world actions. Because our human bodies are made out of joints like elbows, shoulders, and knees, things tend to move in arcs. Otherwise, they look a little bit robotic or mechanical. So arcs are definitely a really important principle to make fluid pleasing to the eye motion. Let's take this popcorn explosion, for example. Can you see how the corn moves in a smooth arc, adding a sense of gravity to the motion? If I was to animate using straight lines instead of arcs, this is what it would look like. Not as convincing, right? Squash and stretch. This technique exaggerates objects to show flexibility, weight, and impact. Squashing an object makes it seem compressed, like when hitting the ground, for example, and stretching shows extension like doing a jump. Take this apricot, for example. Can you see how it squashes and stretches during his jump? As you can see here, I'm manipulating the apricot, trying to get some squash and some stretch. Anticipation. This principle prepares the audience for an action. The common example is a golfer winding up before its swing or how a character crutches before jumping, building expectation and making the movement clearer and more engaging. The formula is usually to build the anticipation by going towards the opposite way of the main action. The faster the main action, the stronger the anticipation. With objects and food, this principle is also very common. Take this puff pastry roll for an example. See how it moves slightly to the left before unrolling to the right. And finally, follow through. Follow through occurs after a main action ends. Parts of the object continue to move before coming to rest. This adds realism showing that objects don't just stop abruptly. Similar to how anticipation prepares the action, follow through completes the action. A nice example of this would be with this banana peel coming to a gradual stop. When we combine these five ingredients, we get a stop motion animation that is just as satisfying to watch as a perfectly prepared meal is to eat. We will examine some of these ingredients alongside other stop motion techniques when we get to the production chapter of the course. But first, let's talk about the gear you'll need and the software you will use to make it happen. 4. Gear Up: Tools of the Trade: Welcome to our studio. In this section, we'll dive into the essential gear and software we need to create high quality foot stop motion from cameras to lighting and the magic of dragon frame. You'll learn how each tool contributes to smooth and professional looking animations. One piece of gear I think we all should have is a black t shirt. I recommend wearing black or dark clothes to make sure there are no lights bouncing from you while you animate, as this can cause unwanted flicker in your animation. For stop motion animation, a DSLR or mailss camera is ideal due to its high quality image. It also offers manual control options and the ability to shoot in raw format for better post production editing. So some features to prioritize are manual focus, which allows you to keep the focus consistent between your frames, manual exposure settings to control your ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. This ensures consistent lighting and image quality. You also want to make sure that your camera has a live view mode, which helps you see each frame in real time, ensuring precise composition and control over your animation. Some examples of cameras often using Start Motion. The whole cannon range is great. We also have great support for Sony and Nikon. They all work really well with dragon frame. I personally use cannon. My first camera that I've bought this one is the 550 D. This one has actually served me for a great number of years when I first started Start Motion. I still use it as a secondary camera. So now in Dragon frame five, since five, you have the option to use multiple cameras, giving you multiple angles, which is amazing. It's a feature that people have been requesting for a long time. And I think you can plug in up to five cameras. So if you have multiple cameras, you can definitely set them up and have multiple angles of your animation or even use them as part of your making of videos, which we'll maybe talk about a bit later. So 550 D is what I had. Then I upgraded to a five D MAC two. Which is quite an old camera now, but it works great for Sub motion, has really good quality and support. And now recently, only a few months ago, I've switched to the new on EOSR, which apparently I'm yet to test this fully, but it gives you full HD quality on your live preview inside of dragon frame. So whichever camera you have, just make sure you go on the Dragon Film website and check the list to make sure it's there. It should be. If it's not, you can still contact them, and they'll reply pretty quickly, and they can add your camera to the list. Okay, so up next, we're going talk about tripods. Tripods. A study tripod or a C stand is also essential to keep your camera fixed in place during the animation process. You want to look for tripods with heavy stable legs to avoid any unwanted camera shake or use sandbags to secure them in place. Some people like to actually hot glue them or tape them to the floor to make sure there's no movement. The reason for that is if by accident you bump your tripod and you move your camera, it becomes really difficult to bring it back to its original position. You basically have to start over, and that's really frustrating, and we've all been there. So yeah, make sure it's solid, secure to avoid that kind of headache. Okay, you also want to make sure that your tripod has adjustable legs and adjustable height, okay? This just allows you more control and more option when it comes to maybe shooting down or raising your camera a little bit, gives you a bit more freedom, basically. You also want to make sure that you are locking all of your axes. So you know how a tripod can do this sort of things. Just make sure you just tighten really hard again to avoid actually moving the camera and again, running your shot. So that's it for tripods. Next up, we're going to talk about some tips for setting up your camera. I finally. Okay, so now some tips for your camera setup. Again, we want to have some sort of setup to be able to shoot from a top down angle. The reason is that in food stop motion, there's a lot of overhead views of ingredients being assembled, your dishes, recipes, all that sort of stuff. So make sure you have some sort of setup so you can have your camera above your working surface. That can be, again, your tripod. A C stand is a very good option, or you can use some sort of system that I've got here, which there is a auto pole from wall to wall, and then I've got a couple of magic arms to hold my lights and my camera. Allows me to basically have no tripods in the way, which in a small place like we have here, is quite handy to again, avoid any bumping any accidents during the shoot. Also want to have some sort of USB cable that you can plug into your camera. So any USB cable will do here. If you have the budget, I recommend these orange ones that you can see in my studio kind of hanging around. They are called the tools, if I'm not mistaken, and they're known for being really reliable and strong. So they just again, we want to avoid losing connection during a shoot with your camera. So they have handy little cable bits and pieces here to make sure that your cable doesn't hang and disconnect. So they're very, very good brand. So that's for the USB cable. You also want to have a dummy battery, AC adapter to power the camera to avoid, again, changing batteries mid shoot and risk running your shot by touching the camera and disturbing the frame. So if you have normal batteries, these kind of come out, and you can replace those with a dummy battery that goes in here. Whoo. And that basically allows you to have the camera running nonstop and no issues there with the battery. We basically in stop motion, are becoming like control freaks, and the idea is to have the ultimate control over everything, so we avoid any problems. That pertains to lighting, as I said, weing dark, closing curtains, consistent lighting, and anything to do with securing our objects and our camera. So that's it for our camera tips. I hope that was helpful. Up next, we're going to talk about lighting. As Good lighting is crucial for food stop motion because it enhances texture, color, and overall appeal. So here's what to consider for your setup. Lighting types. We've got soft box lights or LD panels. These provide diffused light, which softens shadows and even lights the scene. Consistency is key, as even the slightest change in light between frames can cause that unwanted flicker we talked about. Aim for low heat LED lights to avoid unwanted changes in your food items, as nonid lights can generate too much heat and actually melt parts of your food. So more tips for lights. You want to avoid natural light at all cost, as the light during the day will fluctuate and cause some flicker. So make sure you control your lighting, close your curtains and avoid any outside light. You also want to use some field lights to brighten darker areas without overexposing parts of the food. Make sure your lights are always connected to power, and I actually recommend against using flashlighting, as we are going to take a lot of pictures, and the flash will be quite hard to work with. Aside from the camera, tripod, lighting, and dragon frame, here are a few more essentials that will make your food stop motion smoother and more polished. Clamps and stands. Use these to secure lightweight props or hold food items in position between frames, especially for those mid air shots or objects that need to remain stationary. Tweezers and small tools for precise adjustments, especially when working with small food items like seeds, garnishes or herbs. Blue tech or double stadia tape, keeps food objects in place without them moving unintentionally between shots. Backdrop and surfaces. Experiment with different textures and colors for your backgrounds. Theise can be wooden boards, marble countertops, or clean white surfaces often work well for food animation. None of you've covered the gear. Let's take an overview of dragon frame and see how it works. 5. Working with Dragonframe: Dragon Frame is the industry standard software for Stop Motion animation, used on the biggest Blockbuster films by pros or obvious alike for homemade ego videos. Dragonframe was initially created by the Caleri Brothers for their own advertising projects. One of those projects is this amazing commercial for United Airlines called Dragon. This particular spot has really inspired me to start with Stop Motion. I just love the look of it, the cutouts, and the transitions are just amazing. Let's see if you can spot the dragon that inspired the name Dragon frame. There it is. That's where the name comes from. It's no surprise that this ad has won a lot of awards. It's just so beautiful. Where you go in life is up to you. There's one airline that can take you there. United. It's time to fly. Despite multiple new versions and a growing list of features added regularly, dragon frame has always remained affordable and extremely intuitive. PlagonFrame allows you to control your camera remotely. It captures frames, and you can also fine tune your animation in real time, making it ideal for stop motion workflows. Key features include onion skin, which lets you see the previous frame overlay with the current live view to help precisely position objects, frame by frame playback, allowing you to instantly review your animation to ensure smooth movement and taste test your progress as you go. And advanced keypad control, which enables you to take shots without actually touching the camera, preventing accidental shifts and ensuring consistent framing. Before purchasing dragon frame, just make sure that your camera is supported by the software. You can go on their website and see the camera list and make sure that yours is there. So now let's open Dragonframe and take a tour of the interface. Okay, so let's open up Dragonframe. The first thing you'll see is this pop up window that basically allows you to create your project. And the way things are named in dragon frame, we call them scenes and scenes can have multiple takes. So I'm going to create a new scene or a new project, and I'll name this one Food. I can also set my frame rate here. So remember, from a previous lesson, we are going to work at 12 FBS, so 12 frames per second. So I'm going to set 12 here and I'm going to press Okay. Tacon frame will ask me where I want to save this. I'm going to choose the desktop and just save this on my desktop. Once I save my project, they'll create a folder for me called food. In this folder, I'll have other subfolders. The way dragon frame works and it's really smart and you should know just the back end of it. Basically, when you take a picture in dragon frame, it'll save two pictures. I'll save a low res version for easy and fast playback while you're working. And it also save a high res version for you to finalize your video and do some post production. So when I press saved, it also opened up Dragon frame. So here is the software where it looks like. If you're familiar with multiple workspaces, like you have in Light room or DaventreRsolve, you'll see that dragon frame is kind of set up the same way. We've got multiple icons here at the top that allows you to go back and forth between different workspaces. We're going to have a quick two of those in a second. But the first workspace you'll see in the main workspace we'll be working with is this animation workspace. Animation workspace, we've got a live view canvas here of what's happening from our camera. And you can see if I wave my hand here, we are indeed live. Another indicator of whether or not you're alive is this red line that goes around the live view window here. Um I'm going to go back to this animation workspace, but let's have a look at the other ones first, and we'll go back to this one. The next one is this one here that we can access via this camera, and this is called the cinematography Workspace, and this is where we'll do all of our adjustments of our camera settings and image settings. Next up, we have an audio workspace. This is useful if you're doing character or lip sync work, which we won't do in this class, but it's good to know that it's there. And we also have a DMX workspace where we can set up lights. So if you lights have DMX ports, can actually animate lights dragon frame and use keyframes on them and do really cool things. Similarly, if you go to Next workspace, that's the AC motion control workspace. So if you have motion controls or camera sliders, you can plug them into here and also animate camera moves and do really cool things like dollies and tilts and pans. You can have multiple axises and pretty really advanced stuff. As I said, dragon frame is a really powerful tool used in high budget feature films, so it's got a lot of nice features. We won't touch on those, we won't get ahead of ourselves. Let's go back to these two main workspaces that we'll be using this catography workspace and the animation workspace. So in the cinema workspace, we are going to adjust our camera settings. So here, I've got controls over the Zoom of this view, right. If I click on this one, it'll fit the view to my window. And this is a cool space because I can not only adjust my settings of my camera, I can also take test shots. So for example, if I click on this test shot button, I'll take a picture of my scene here and I can zoom in and see details of that picture. It basically allows you to view that picture. You can also view this picture by right clicking on it and opening it up in your application of choice. So you can open up in Photoshop, or you can reveal that picture in the finder and see what it looks like here. Okay, so you can see, I've got two pictures that are taken here, both a JPEG and a CR three, which is a raw format. And I'll explain a bit why that is. Okay. Let's go down the line from these windows, and we'll cover a little bit in detail what this workspace allows you to do. So first up, we have this histogram that basically shows you whether or not your camera is overexposed or underexposed. So if you're familiar with photography, you might know what a histogram is. So if I overexposed my image, you can see the graph is going to the right. And if I do the opposite gets really dark and underexposed, you can see the histogram is already to the left. So pretty handy to have that here. And as you can see, I'm already jumping down into the camera settings, and this is where you can adjust your camera. The cool thing about dragon frame is that you can remotely access most of your camera. So I can adjust here. The first slider is the shutter speed. So you can see if I go to the left, you can start seeing some seconds, so I can have it open for multiple seconds, and I can dial in my light exactly. The slider beneath that is our F Stop. And because I'm shooting down, I'm actually going to go quite high on my Ftop. I'm going to go to F 16 because I want to have most things in focus. And the bottom slider here you might recognize is your ISO. So I recommend keeping the lowest possible ISO that you can just to avoid any grain in your image. And because we're working with fixed cameras and control lighting, we are actually able to bump up the shutter time quite a bit and allow for more light to go into your sensor. But this way, avoid bumping ISO for no reason, right? So this is where you play with your a triangle of exposure and try to find the right exposure settings. Again, a test shot to have a look at that image. You can also turn on an AB comparison of images and see what they look like from one to the next. So pretty handy. Moving down the line, we've got a drop down here for picture style, so I can adjust the picture style. I like to stick to standard or neutral. Then we have image quality. So this is quite an important one. Just make sure you've got that setup, right? I like to always shoot at raw plus, large fine JPEG. So I like to have both formats, a large fine JPEG to work quickly with, and a raw one that allows me to have a lot of flexibility in the editing phase of a project. One is white balance, and here I can set the white balance of my image. So again, you want to avoid anything on auto when doing stop motion. I like to set mine to color temperature because I can control the temperature of my lights. So I've set all of my lights up at 4,600 Kelvin, which is a daylight setting, and I can set up exactly here and dragon frame, so that keeps the lighting and the color temperature quite consistent. Again, because we're shooting raw, even if I make a mistake here, I can always go back and adjust temperature after the fact. But it's always a good idea to set things up right from the get go and avoids you have to do multiple, you know, edits afterwards. I can also control the flash here. This is something I never use, and these ones here a bit more advanced. Again, I won't bother with these ones. The main ones you want to use is picture style, image quality, and color temperature, and of course, your ISO, aperture and shutter speed. Okay, so once you're happy with your test shot, and again, remember that red line, you can see that this red line is showing up here, so I'm in live. And if I click on the test shot, I no longer have a red line, so you won't see my hand here because I'm seeing a test shot of the live view. So if I click on this camera icon, I'm back in the live view. Another thing I can do in this workspace that I like to do is click on this cross hair here and that's the focus check. And once I click on that, I get this rectangle and I can move that around. In this case, I'm going to focus on this focus card here and double click. And once I do that, I have, I think it's like eight time Zoom in L at my scene here, and I can actually remote control my focus. So if I click on the three arrows here, it'll do a very strong adjustment. But on the two arrows, I can do smaller increments and even smaller on that one arrow. Can really nail that focus. If I flip my focus card here, I've got even a more precise diagram here, and I can fine tune. I get quite OCD about this. I want to make sure my focus is just right. But again, because we're working at F 16, I do have some leeway here in terms of focus. To get out of focus check, all I have to do is double click again on that image, and I am back out. This is all we need to know right now about the cinematography workspace. Let's now jump back to our animation workspace. Let's go back into the animation workspace. As I said, this is where we'll do most of our work. Similar to the previous workspace on the live view, we've got the option to zoom in onto whatever we're doing, and I can use my hand here to move around. If I go all the way to the right, it'll fit that view to my workspace. That zoom in is something you do quite a lot, especially because we're working sometimes very small items, like food items, like, you know, I'll be working with, like, chickpeas that are very small. So it's good to be able to zoom in into that area with your live view. Other tools I have here is this mask button. That allows you to create a temporary mask on top of your image. So I've got mine set up as a nine by 16 because I'm working in a vertical format. By the way, my camera is set to portrait, and I can set that up also in view portrait. You can see that set up here. Just so you know that this mask is only for your previewing purposes. Dragon fame doesn't ever crop your image. You always get the full sensor of your full frame camera if you've got a full frame camera. Um, this is only to know for you where the edge of your frame is. So when you do your composition, you know exactly that is where my frame ends. And you can change, again, that mask to different formats. If you're doing a square or 16 by nine, you've got those options here. Next to that mask, we have aspect ratio lines. These are things for title safe zones, things like that. We've got grids that we can adjust. So in the right hand side here, all of these options are adjustable both in their Alpha and transparency. So I can adjust the transparency of that grid. But I can change I can also change the settings of that grid. So if I want to have less or more lines, I can do that here. Okay. And that works pretty much the same way for every other options, like the broadcast, the aspect ratio, I can also change that here. I've got basically more options on that right hand side. I can also rotate my view if my camera is upside down or flip it, that can come in quite handy. And beneath those buttons is where our timeline is. So far, we haven't taken any picture, so let's take our first picture in Dragonframe. If you buy Dragonframe from their website, you'll find the option to have it ship with a keypad, which I definitely recommend. You can do everything on your keyboard, but having a keypad is just so much more handy because you can have it right by your side and just avoids you to go back and forth between your computer. In the past, they used to have wired ones, and now they've got a Bluetooth version, which is great. It also comes with a protector because these things tend to be dropped a lot, so I've dropped a few. I've broken a few. So having some protection on it is a good thing. So I'm going to take my first picture, and to do that, it's nice and easy, all I have to do is press Enter either on the keyboard or on my keypad. So let's take a picture. Okay. So as you can see, in my timeline, I've got a first picture here at the bottom. And the camera is my live view. If I click on the camera, I am back in Live view, you can see the red line is showing back up. If I click on the picture, I can see that picture. I can turn off all of my grid lines and masks just to make that more easy for you. Okay, I can also zoom in on that picture, as well. Right now, we only seeing a preview version of that picture. That's why it's kind of pixelated. If I want to see a full raised version, I can click on that button here that looks like a diamond, and it'll show me a preview of the full rays version of that picture. Or I can right click and Reveal in Finder and it'll show me that JPEG image. Okay. So again, two formats, I've got JPEG and a raw version of that image. If I don't like my image, I can delete that image by pressing the backspace or the elite key or I can right click and just hit Delete. And that image is gone. So it's not actually completely gone. Dragon frame will keep that saved for you. If I click on the bin here, it'll open up the bin tray, and I can see my image is here and I can put it back into my timeline. I can also temporarily hide my frame. So if I go hide frame, it'll hide that frame from the sequence. Okay, let's hide. And let's take another picture. Why not? Let's do a bit of movement here. Okay. Let's do another one. Can't help myself. Already. I'm already animating. Oh, one thing you might have noticed just then, when I take a picture, you can see there's a black screen here called capture Blackout. And that's because I've got this set under my preferences. If I go to capture, here is the option to use a blackout screen. By default, I don't think you'll have this selected. I like to do that because I get quite obsessed with flicker, as you might have noticed, I've talked a lot about flicker in my previous lessons, and having your screen, usually your screen is right next to where you're working. So I've got my laptop here to the side, and sometimes the light from the laptop that is the screen light will actually show up a little bit on the scene. And because that light and that screen always changes, it might create a bit of flicker. So something to look out for. If you do want to avoid that, make sure you've got the capture blackout set on. Okay, so I've got a couple of frames here and you can see there's already a bit of movement. I can play back this movement by pressing the space bar or play on the keypad, and you can see here we got something moving. At the bottom, we've got options for playback. I can loop my playback. So if I press Play it'll loop that there is also an option to add a black frame after playback. Instead of going into the live view, that can be helpful because sometimes something different will be happening here and that can kind of mess up the preview. That's pretty handy. Then we have an onion skin option here, which we'll talk about a little bit later, an option to reverse playback. So you can see here I'm playing in reverse, and we'll talk about why you want to do that, why you want to animate in reverse in a later lesson. And lastly, we have a Tuggle option, which is pretty fun as well. You can actually see what's happening here in the timeline. I'm not pressing anything. I've just pressed Toggle, and Toggle will toggle back and forth between the live view, which is this camera icon and the last frame that you shot. And this is to show you basically how your timing, how your spacing is working on whatever you're animating. And you'll see me do that a lot during my animation is I go back and forth a lot to just check, okay? This has moved way too much, so I'm going to move this back. Okay, maybe a little bit more. Okay, I'll like that, right? So I go back and forth to check. Maybe I want even a little bit more. Okay, so back and forth, back and forth. This is to check your movement, check your motion, and see if your animation is looking right. So it's kind of a muscle memory, and it's kind of a way that you can feel the animation is by having this back and forth. In the old days, Disney guys, when they used to work on paper, you'll see them flip the paper, actually multiple pages of paper, back and forth between their fingers. This is how we start animating, and it's kind of like a flipbook, right? So you're flipping back and forth just to see preview animation instead of pressing play all the time. It's good to know what's happening just on the last frame. So that's Tuggle here. I'm going to exit out of the bin tray. And I think that's it for now, that's, I think, a good starting tour for Dragonframe. As I said, we'll go a little bit deeper into the software as we start animating some food. This covers all you need to know right now and how to use Dragonframe. Once we start animating our food, we'll go a little bit deeper on all these features. Congrats. You are now familiar with this wonderful software. Well done. 6. Animating Step by Step: You in this section, we'll apply our five stop motion principles to five stop motion techniques through practical examples. I've come up with funny names for these techniques to make them a bit more memorable for you. First up is the good old switcheroo or replacement animation. Replacement animation is a stop motion technique where instead of moving a single object gradually frame by frame, you swap out different versions of an object to simulate motion. This is especially useful when creating complex actions that would be difficult to manipulate smoothly with only just the one object. Let's use popcorn as an example. In this sequence, I will make a popcorn kernel pop by swapping out individual kernels with progressively larger puffier versions to show it popping in real time. So here are the steps. I'll start by setting up my stage. I'll prepare a simple scene where the popcorn will pop. I'll make sure my camera is mounted securely in a tripod and my lighting is consistent. For popcorn prep, I will sauce versions of popcorn in different stages of popping. I can use real popcorn here and start with unpopped kernel, a half popped one, and a fully popped piece. To animate a popcorn, I'll place the unpopped kernel on the set and take my first frame. I can make it stand up by using some sticky pat I will also make it jitter a little side to side to add some anticipation before the pop. Then I'll have it raised off the ground by using my winder rig and take each frame as it gradually goes up. I'm also thinking about my easing out principle to make his jump decelerate towards the apex. Then I'll swap my unpopped kernel with a half popped one for the next frame to show the kernel expanding. After that, I'll switch to a fully popped kernel for the final transformation. All the while I am using this precise winder rig to move the corn by tiny increments and applied my easing out principle to create a smooth jump. You can also use an amature wire to achieve a similar effect. I will then remove this rig in post production. For an added flourish, I'll let the popped kernel bound slightly in the final few frames, applying our follow through principle, where the movement continues even though the main action has stopped. Next up is a very common technique that I like to call rewind mode. Rewind mode or animating in reverse. This means we are basically working backwards by shooting the final frame first and moving towards the starting position. This technique is particularly useful when animating food that needs to look a certain way when assembled, as it can be easier to manage when disassembled. It's also commonly used when creating typography, out of food or logos, like in the work of Beca Clason. For the course title animation, I use this technique by starting with the finished design first and working my way backwards. Another nice feature of dragon frame is the ability to import an image or a logo at a separate layer and your live view to help you line up precisely your designs with your food. Another important tip is to really think about your easing in and easing out principles. So that frame two, for example, barely moves, and you gradually increase the spacing as the elements move out of frame so that when you play your animation in reverse, you get a nice smooth motion easing into the final design. Slice, dice, and chop. There are countless creative ways to coll up food in stop motion. I love this approach of grading a carrot. I used a couple of guides on top of my Live view to ensure I reposition the carrot in exactly the same place for each frame. By playing with the spacing, I created a nice deceleration effect. Adding a quick sound effect here to the mix really sells the illusion. Human touch. Animating yourself or someone else's hands can serve as both a tool and a character in the animation. Adding a playful and interactive element that makes the action feel more organic and relatable. This technique is unique to stop motion and can enhance storytelling in ways that digital animation, CGI, or even AI often struggles with, especially with the intricacy of hands. The technique of animating the human body is also called pixelation. For examples of this look, you can look up the work of animator Norman McLaren. Reality remix. This is perhaps the biggest superpower of Stop Motion. The ability to give any object new meanings through creative visual storytelling. By using everyday food items and re contextualizing them, you can create engaging and imaginative animations. The possibilities for food transformations, metaphors, and new meanings are endless. The body of work from Paz is a prime example of this approach to stop motion. By working this way, clients will come to you not only for the execution, but more importantly, for your clever ideas. 7. Planning Your Scene: Now are we familiar with the various principles, our ingredients of stop motion animation, and the stop motion techniques, our cooking methods. Let's bring it all together into one project, a recipe. We'll create a short animation demonstrating a basil hummus recipe and we'll incorporate as many principles and techniques to create something unique and fun. For more complex animation, it can be quite useful to create a storyboard to plan our sequence of actions. I will work in Procreate in a vertical format, so I can post this to Instagram as a real. So let's draw ourselves a bit of a plan. Okay, so I'm going to list my ingredients first for this recipe. I'll have some basil, chick peas, garlic, tahini, some lemon juice, some pine nuts for topping, and maybe some spices like paprika and Zata. I'm going to have my ball come into the frame, maybe with a slight overshoot, as well. And then the chickpeas will quickly follow with a bit of an arc. I'd like them to spin around the ball and add a bit of a stop to it before they go into the bowl. So some anticipation there. Then they're going to quickly pop into the bowl, and I'm going to introduce my other ingredients like the lemon, the basil leaves, and maybe the garlic and the tahini as well. Once those ingredients go into the bowl, I'm going to bring my hand and have some sort of interaction, adding that human touch we talked about. So maybe the hand is going to go and grab the bowl and help it spin somehow. And we're going to add some anticipation as well to that spin. So it spins maybe counterclockwise, and then we have that clockwise spin. That spin will initiate the mix for the humus, so the humus will blend. And I think what will look really cool is if I can have the dish cover the camera, so it's going to go up and fly into the air, cover the camera, and then drop back down maybe as a different plate, and maybe introduce a different background as well. So once the dish lands, I'm going to add the final toppings. So the spices, maybe some basil leaves, and some decoration on the edge of the frame would look cool as well. So now that I've got my plan all laid out in my storyboard, we are ready to shoot our animation. 8. Bringing It to Life: Okay, so we are now inside of dragon frame and ready to animate our recipe. Okay, so I have my camera set up in portrait, and I have my nine by 16 mask on, and I also did a focus check and a couple of test shots to make sure I am happy with the image and the composition. So let's bring our first prop into the shot. That is our gray ball here that will gradually ease into the center of the frame. I have drawn some straight vertical lines on a drawing layer to help me line up the edges of the ball and to make sure it moves in a straight line. As mentioned in the storyboard, I'd like to give the ball slight overshoot, meaning it'll slightly go too far and then come back slowly into the center, giving the animation some subtle bounds. I could have had the ball already in the center, but I want to have an empty frame to start with because I want to incorporate some text and the title of the recipe in the video. If you do want to work with text, it's a good thing to think ahead and plan for these moments when text will appear. Okay, so that's the last frame for that first move of the ball. Let's have a look at the playback and see how that feels. Okay, so that's looking good. I've got my nice overshoot, as well, then coming to a nice subtle stop. And here is that motion from different angles. So again, here, I'm using the drawing layers and the guidelines to help me with creating my arcs for my chickpeas. So I want them to move in from the bottom left here and come in in a nice arc and then start spinning around the ball. I'm going to use the increment editor and add myself a bit of tick marks. So I want to have 24 tick marks around the ball. So there is about 2 seconds to complete a spin. So those increments are right now in linear. They're at the same spacing from each other. And I'm just lining up the chick peas on those white tick marks and also on the red line to follow my x. And that's taking a bit of time to make it happen. I just want to make sure I'm not introducing too many chick peas and I stop when I'm completing the circle. Okay, awesome. So all of my chick peas have now joined my circle. So I've got 24 chick peas, and I can start creating my spin. So all I have to do here is actually introduce another frame of them moving in between those tick marks. So I'm going to create kind of a fake loop here for the spin. So it's going to go from one tick mark to the next, but I just want to have this in between frame to complete that motion. So again, still going in linear increments, and you can see here in real time how long it takes me to move all 24. So this is by far, probably the most time consuming piece in this animation, moving all those chick peas. One by one and making sure they still line up on my guidelines. Okay, let's speed this up a little bit. Okay, so now that I've spun a little bit a couple of times with my loop, I'm going to slow them down so they come to a gradual stop, and I'm just going to eyeball this and just move them frame by frame here and make sure they slow down. Okay, so let's play back the whole thing, wave those arcs with the spin and the slow down. So, again, this is the time consuming part of the process here. Nice time lapse to show it. Okay, so now I've got my bowl in the middle and my chick peas ready to go in. I think it is also a good spot to have maybe some text in the bowl showing how many grams of chickpeas I'm going to use for this recipe. I'll try to also have the chickpeas overlay the text. I think there'll be a nice way to integrate the typography within the animation. Okay, so now I'm adding the chick peas into the bowl at first one by one, and then I just add more and more. So the animation is quite quick. Okay, so once all my 24 chickpeas are in, I feel like the bowl feels a bit empty, so I'm going to add more and take a frame each time. Okay, so let's see it in action. Great. Looking good. Okay, so now we have to cook those chickpeas, so I thought it'd be good idea to have my hand come into the shot. So introducing here a human touch or a pixelation. And I'm just going to have the hand come in and then do a quick snap of the fingers, and then those chickpeas will be cooked. I'll just replace them with already cooked chickpeas. Okay, looking good. So now I want to introduce my other ingredients. So the lemon juice, the ini the garlic, and basil leaves. And to do that, I'm going to actually choose my animation technique we spoke about earlier, which would be animating in reverse. Okay, the rewind mode. This is because I want to have a nice layout, nice composition of those elements around the bowl. So I'm going to place them first in the final position and then animate my way backwards and remove them from the frame. So for the basil leaves, which I think look great, they add this nice touch of green and color to the composition, I'm going to bring up my guideline from before and make sure that I line them up on that circle that we used for the check piece. So there it is. Maybe also use those increments, so they have a nice equal distance between them. So again, those guidelines come in really handy, and you can reuse some from before as well. Okay, so let's do some final adjustments here on the items, and I'm ready to animate them outwards. So I'm not going to animate them all the way out to the edge of the frame. I'm just going to pop them in one by one. I'll start with basil leaves and then work my way around the design with then the tahini, the garlic, and then finally the lemon. So this is what this animation looks like in reverse. So now I'm going to select the first frame of this bit here and shift select the last one. I'm going to cut those frames, right click and then paste in reverse. And that's going to reverse the order. And if I play this now, you can see it's coming into the scene. Let's play it one more time. Fantastic. So now I can bring these ingredients into the bowl. I'll also reintroduce my hand by having it reach and grab the ball of Homs, do a slight anticipation counterclockwise, and then give the ball a big spin to simulate that blending action on the recipe. To make this happen, I need to have my blender nearby and take a number of frames of different stages of blending from rough to smooth. This is, in a way, a type of switcheroo happening here or replacement animation that we've talked about earlier. Here's what that blend spin motion looks like. Pretty cool, right? Okay, moving on to the more tricky part of the video, I want the ball to rise all the way up and cover the lens of the camera with its homos texture. To make it happen, I'm going to use my daughter's lego duplo. Tse bricks are great because they are sturdy, quick to assemble, and give me regular increments to work with. So you can see here, I'm rising the plate, being quite careful so it doesn't fall over and ruins my set. I'm also adding a bit of ease out principle. So when the dish gets close to the camera to make the transition nice and soft. Then when my camera view is completely full of homos, I'm going to swap the dish and also swap the background before having it fall all the way back down to the center of the frame. I've chosen a contrasting shape here for the dish and color as well with this yellow fish and also a wooden backdrop to make that change of scenery as strong as possible with the idea of having the view move from the kitchen top with this marble texture to the dining table with the wooden texture. I've also added some chick peas bursting from the plate as a dish makes contact with the table. This really exaggerates that impact. To make the chick peas disappear more smoothly, I did a sui hivu here with some pine nuts. Looking good. Okay, it's also time to add my other toppings to dress up the dish with my olive oil, then the basil leaves, zata and paprika for garnish. Finally, I'm adding a couple of props to dress up the table with this nice garlic bread at the top and a wooden board and some cornbread from the bottom. Alright, so now let's check out the entire animation. That's great. So now let's move into post production to finish our video. 9. Editing and Finishing Touches: Now that we've captured our frames and brought our food to life three stop motion, it's time to dive into one of the most crucial steps post production. This is where animation truly comes together and shines. First things first, let's start by double checking our frames inside of dragon frame. So here's a tip. Play through your animation a couple of times to check for any missed movements or on one that jumps in the motion. Sometimes your frames might need a bit of a cleanup. If you have extra frames or perhaps some mistakes, maybe a hand snuck into the shut, don't worry. You can easily delete or re order frames to ensure your animation is smooth and clean. This is also the time to do final timing twigs by holding certain frames for longer timing or removing frames altogether. It always amazes me how one frame less or more can make a huge difference. Let's take this part of the sequence, for example, where the plate drops back down and I can isolate this particular sequence by pressing I on my keyboard for in. This will basically create an endpoint, similar to Premiere Pro, if you've used that before. So in and I want to stop right about here, I'm going to press O for out. So I've got my in and out markers. So now if I've got the loop button selected, and I press Play, it'll just cycle through those few frames. Okay? And I feel like we can get some more impact on that fall. Okay? So this is, again, the importance of just one frame. So as the plate drops, I remember from my chute that I've got, yeah, you can see, I've got a little bit of lego here between the plate and my table. Okay? So this creates basically an ease in effect and it softens that landing. I want more impact. So I'm going to remove this frame here altogether. So frame 197. I'm going to click on that. I can press delete or right click and select. That's going to delete that frame. So now if I play this back, boom, we've got a much stronger impact. Okay? So sometimes removing frames can make a very big difference. Okay, so as I said previously, I like to work with the raw images and do some more post production, but you can also export, if you're happy with the results from Dragonframe, you can export a movie straight out of Dragonframe and get a video this way. To do that, it's quite easy. You just go to file export movie and then choose your source, make sure you have the high risk JPEx that we've been shooting so far. And the exposure is the camera that you want to export from. So I've got multiples, but if you have just one, it'll be selected here. The frame rate, make sure that is the framework you're working with and you want to select all frames. And the cool thing is here, you can say to Dragon Frame, actually, I want you to crop to my aspect ratio and make a nine by 16 video out of it. So use that crop. You can also set the um, scale here. So by default, if you set 200% scale, it'll create a huge file with lots of pixels. We are working with 1080 by 1920. That's a nine by 16 resolution. So you can set it up here, and then you've got the exact dimensions of your movie. And then all you have to do is choose your movie type, so you could choose MP four, which is nice and compressed, or you can go uncompressed and choose like a PRs quick time. Okay, so let's export that and see what that looks like. I can choose my destination here. I'll just put that on the desktop. Okay, so I've made some changes to my sequence here by holding some frames, removing other frames, and basically creating pauses and variation in timing. And this makes for more entertaining and better viewing experience. So it's important to have some breathing spaces. You can see this bit here has been sped up while other bits and pieces have been slowed down to ensure there's enough time to register what's happening on screen. Once I'm happy with this timing and frame order, I can go on the left hand side here and conform my sequence. And that's basically is going to bake in all of my changes and create the final sequence of images in my Dragonframe folder. And speaking of that folder, I can access it at any time by right clicking on any image here in the timeline and select Reveal in Finer. And that's going to open up my source folder. So in here, I've gone ahead and went into the filter options here, and I can filter my images by kind, application or size. And that's basically as a handy tip so that you can sort images because right now you've got both types. You've got the JPEGs and the raw images. Remember how we set up that initial file format, and I want to work with the highest possible resolution, so I'm working with the raw images. So to sort those images, I've got this filter happening, and I'm going to select Shift Select all of my raw images, and I'm basically going to drag them inside of Photoshop here. Okay, so Photoshop is going to then open up Camera Raw, and Camera Raw is basically a separate app that comes in with Photoshop and allows you to work with raw images. So it's quite a powerful bit of an app. I'm going to ignore this pop up for now. And you can see I've got all of my images opened up here. So this is great because I can basically do any edit on one image and effect all the images in that sequence at the same time. To do that, I'm going to click on the first or last image and scroll all the way back and shift Salk and you can see now I've got all those images selected. So if I make any change here, let's go crazy and go pink, you can see all those images go pink now. So similar to light room, if you've used light room before and worked on multiple images, you can do edits this way. So the first thing I want to do is actually go into my optics, and you can see here by default, camera row as detected my camera model and also my camera lens. And if I remove the corrections, you can see it's correcting for some distortion and also vignetting, okay? So that's pretty handy. Make sure you've got that selected. I'm also going to rotate my images because right now it's in landscape and I want to work in portrait. So I'm going to go here into the crop, and I'm going to rotate conoce. So I've got my images in a vertical format. So that's looking good. I think I've got, you know, good lighting to work from. But let's go through quickly and show you what options you've got here. And this is why we use raw because we've got control over a lot more settings than if those were just JPEGs. So, for example, I can up the exposure. I can adjust my contrast, highlights shadows. And you can see I can retrieve a lot of information from those settings. I also got control over color, so I can change the color temperature if I want to go cooler or warmer. I got those settings. I can adjust the tint. And also vibrance and saturation is something that is quite fun to play with. And if you want to go even more in detail and add detail, you can work on the texture here and add some texture or clarity. All of these work really great. I've got a curve graph here to work with, and here is where things get really really intense and fun. I can go and isolate particular colors. So for example, the greens, I can adjust the saturation on my greens. If I want the basil here to pop up more to be darker, I can play on just those. Same with the luminans you can see I can adjust that. And again, all of these options I have control over because I'm using the raw images. So they're a bit larger, bit more cumbersome to work with because they're big files, but trust me, in the end, it really gives you a lot more editing options. So go around and have a play with these. I'm going to make some changes, and then I'll show you how to export those in a second. Okay, so I've made my changes. The idea here is that we don't get too carried away with making too many changes. The reason for that is that we don't want our image to look too artificial. I can cycle through the before and after. So as you can see, I've made things a bit brighter. I can also show a side by side comparison. So this is before, and this is after. So you can see a bit brighter the greens, more saturation, more white. You can see on the hand as well this is before, this is after. So a bit broader and all around, just more appealing. Okay, so I'm going to select everything. I can also do a Command A to select all my images, and now I can export them. So I'm going to go to the top here and choose a location. So I'm going to go a little bit outside here and go into this JPEG. I usually like to call them retouched. Select that folder and document name. That's fine. I can do a two digit, starting from frame. One is fine. Actually, FM got more than two. We got three digits. Let's go for that. Okay, and I want to use a JPEG format, quality high. That's all good. And let's go ahead and save. You can see at the bottom left that I've got 262 images remaining. So I'll let that run through, and we'll see you on the other side. Okay, so my export has just finished. Let's go and have a peek at our folder again and make sure everything has saved correctly. So I'm gonna go into the JPEG, retouched. And it looks like everything's right here and looking beautiful. Okay, fantastic. So, there are a few changes I want to make still before I bring this into final editing. I've noticed a slight mistake right around here, and I've made a mental note about that while I was shooting. As you can see, I've got the wooden plate in the bottom corner here that's going up. And I think right about Yeah, there it is. So it's moving here and then stays still here and it's moving here. I basically forgot to move it on that one frame. So that's frame 232. So what I might do is change 231 and just remove that. Yeah, that's how I'll fix it. So let's open up 231, which is right here. Let's check. Yeah, perfect. So 231, I'm going to open that with Photoshop. Done with Camera Raw, so I can just say done. I'm also going to open 230, so I have a frame with nothing in the corner, and I'm simply going to copy 230, command A, come in C, to 231. Yep, Shi command V to copy. Then all I have to do is just I can make a mask can remove. Let's just make a mask. I think that'll be simpler. I'm going to invert the mask and just paint the little bit here. Yep. Here we go. So essentially, I've just masked out the entire image. I've just left the bottom left corner. So that sits on top of my frame that I wanted to adjust. Okay? So I'm going to save this and I'm going to go save now, initially, it will ask me to do a photoshop. I just wanted to save as a JPEX so I don't mess up my sequence. So I think the way to do that is to save a copy and just remove the word copy. Yep, and then just save. I'll ask me if I want to replace it, I do want to replace it. So I'll just hit Okay, and let's just check that. 231. Yeah, perfect. Now that's gone. And it moves. Okay, so now that we've got all of frames fixed up, I've erased the little mistakes. I can go ahead and import that JPEC sequence into my editing software of choice. I like to work with the Venture resolve because of its coloring tools, so I can do further color grading and color correction in resolve on that JPEC sequence. But you can also import this into after effects if you want to do some motion graphics on top of the stop motion. Premiere is also a good choice, final cut. Any software he'll accept that image sequence. The process for these editing softwares is pretty much similar across the board. You import your image sequence. You make sure that your frame rate is correct, and then you choose your export settings according to the platform that you want to output to. Let's take a look at DaVinci resolve, how to import our sequence, and how to export it. Okay, so inside of the Bent resolve, I'm going to import my JPEG image sequence into the media pool, and that's going to create a sequence for me. I want to check the frame rate. Right now it's set to 24 FPS. So let's change that. By right clicking, I'm going to go into clip attributes and change the frame rate to be a custom frame rate of 12 FPS. Press Okay, and I then want to create a new timeline by right clicking again with the selected clip, and I want to name this final. And if I use the product setting, it's going to create a wide screen horizontal timeline. So I'm going to uncheck that and go to format and change this to be a vertical resolution. It's going to switch things around for me, and I'm going to have a nine by 16 timeline. Let's press Create. And you can see now I've got a nice vertical timeline. Okay, we can play this through. That looks good. Awesome. Here I can adjust my colors again. This is why I like resolve. I can go into the color tab and play with my color, color boost, play with a contrast with the mid, the gamma, all that sort of good stuff. A quick side note here about sound. Adding sound effect and music can really elevate your stop motion from good to unforgettable. Imagine the satisfying pop of popcorn popping or the swish of a strawberry diving into a smoothie. For me, sound is 50% of the experience of a video, and sound design actually deserves its own master class. But just know for now that this step is also when I would add sound effect and music to complete my video. Sinking sound to you animation is also all about timing. Make sure the sound precisely matches the visual and the motion in your frames, like a spoon clinking to the bowl or slice of bread landing on a sandwich. Actually gathered hundreds of thousands of sounds over the years. I organize those in sound libraries on my hard drive. You can also do that yourself, or you can go on paid platforms like Artlist or Sound to help you find the exact sound you're looking for. There are also some free websites where you can find royalty free sound effects. Or better yet, if you have the budget, go ahead and find a sound designer in your area. They'll help you out immensely. And to export this sequence, I'm going to go into the deliver page. In this page, I can choose what platform I want to output to. So TikTok, video, YouTube. I'm going to choose YouTube, and again, you don't have to choose a particular platform. I like the YouTube preset. Just make sure it's set to vertical, and I'm going to add that to the Render Queue. Let's name this final on my desktop, and I'm going to select that and then say Render A. Okay, and we're done. Let's right click Reveal in Finder. And we've got our final video. Awesome. Okay, so here's the animation again after I've added some text and some sound design. And then you have it, your food, start motion animation is ready to share with the world. What are you uploading to Instagram, YouTube or presenting it as part of a project? Don't forget to keep engaging your audience with the same creativity and passion that went into making you animation. Post production is where all the hard work comes together. It's a space to refine, enhance and really give your start motion the attention it deserves. So take your time, explore and experiment with different tools and techniques. And you never know. You might stumble upon something that makes your animation even more magical. 10. Ready to Serve: Final Thoughts & Next Steps: Hi. Who. Wow. What an incredible journey we've taken together in this master class on animating food. We explore the wonderful world of Stop Motion and how you can transform simple food items into engaging stories that capture the imagination. We started by understanding the basics of stop motion, learning about the principles like timing, spacing, ease in and ease out, all of which help bring our food to life in unique and delightful ways. You've seen how these principles can be applied creatively to animate anything from popcorn to swirling spaghetti. Then we dive into the equipment and tools necessary for our craft. With tools like dragon frame, we learn how to control animations with precision. The onion skinning feature and the frame by frame playback are invaluable tools for achieving that seamless look in your animations. Next, we had fun experimenting with various animation techniques like replacement animation, shooting in reverse, or using actual hands in the frame, bringing it all together in a complex recipe video. So now, as you wrap up, I encourage you to take everything you've learned and start animating. Don't be afraid to think outside the box and let your imagination run wild. The possibilities are endless. Start small and practice the principles. Then try to tackle specific techniques that we've learned. Remember, stop motion animation is not just about the final product. It's also about the joy of creation, the stories you tell, and the connections you make with your audience through your art. So share your animations, get your feedback, and continue refining your skills. Lastly, I'd like to thank you for taking this master class. I can't wait to see the incredible food stop motion animations you'll create. So go ahead, get your cameras ready, and let's get animating. Food isn't just served. Is it brought to life. Thank you all and happy animating.