Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Travis. In this class I'm
going to show you an easy stop-motion technique to bring your favorite
animals to life. We're going to be
animating using salt. If you're a beginner or even
if you're an intermediate, I think you'll gain a lot
of value from this course. I really like to simplify complex tasks so
they're approachable. And I'll walk you
through that today so that you can find out right off the bat stop motion is exciting. You can create
exciting projects. Will be creating a
series of animal poses out of salt or sugar. And using a free
stop-motion app called Stop Motion Studio will put those images together and loop them so that
when played back, look like an animal is
running while you need to dive into this
course is a smartphone. The free version of
Stop Motion Studio app, and some basic ingredients
in your pantry, in your kitchen, and some basic supplies
around the house. I provided three video clips
in the resource tab below this video to get you jump
started on your project. Three videos are one of a cat, of a horse, and
three is a giraffe. You've choose to animate
any of those animals. I'll be going through the
animation of a horse. And you can follow along a lot of the techniques and
a lot of the theory of animal movement
is going to transfer to those three different
animals and your pet. I'm Travis Ashley. I'm a stop-motion animator
and amateur photographer. Well, just one core game
particular, this is low-level. She's a big personality
in our family. Every time I watch
her do silly things, I think of how much personality our pets and animals in
general seem to have. I've always been amazed at how animated movies capture that quirkiness
that animals have. Capturing personality with
movement is like magic to me and for a long
time I didn't know how to create my own magic. When I began learning
stop-motion a few years ago, I realized I could essentially play
around with an object, take a bunch of photos of it, press Play, and
boom, it's alive. I was immediately hooked. By the end of this class. You'll have created a
looping stop-motion video that you can share
on social media to show off your new skills. I hope that this gives you the opportunity to let
your creativity flow, helps you to
understand how animals move, and most importantly, helps build your competence to create more
stop-motion animation. So let's go
2. Class Project: Welcome, Thanks for joining
me for some animation today. Your class project
will be to create a stop-motion animated loop using salt as the
animation medium. And the subject will
be cat, a giraffe, or you can animate the horse, which is the one that I'll
be showing you step-by-step. Some of the ways
you can really get creative with this project are depending on
the ingredients you find in your kitchen
and in your pantry. Using salt. In some sprinkles. I'll add those in
for a pop of color. If you don't have salt,
you can use sugar. It doesn't matter if it's
white sugar, brown sugar. As long as you have
something small granule so that we can really get those fine details of the animal that
we're animating. It's perfect to find
decorative sugar. Or you also have sprinkles
that you found that's great. Here's a few ingredients
might find in your kitchen that I would
avoid animating with. Things like coffee
beans will even oily residue on your surface. Rice is a little bit too big of a grain to get the
fine details will need powdered
ingredients like flour, cocoa powder, or powdered
herbs or ******. Those are gonna be
hard to clean up. Hard to move around
from pose to pose and actually get all of the
residue into a new post. So it'll look a
little bit messy. So I would avoid these. I came across a few items
in the kitchen that I thought might add to the baking
theme of this animation. So I have these little
colorful muffin mini muffin cups, a whisk. I also found a rolling pin, and I thought I'd
place these items in the corner of the
frame just to give a little bit more context to the theme of food
ingredients being animated. Now I was also
thinking maybe using measuring spoons or the corner
of the edge of a plate, maybe showing in view. And I might add a little bit
of interests to the frame, or you could keep it
simple and just use the the main animation
as the focal point.
3. Supplies: Okay, Let's talk supplies. There are four basic things
you need for this shot. You need a cell phone camera, need a work surface, kitchen table or coffee table, the floor, I'm using a
large cutting board. You could use a large
piece of poster board. Anything that's flat,
that doesn't really have any deep grooves that your salt will get stuck in. Its perfect. You need some way to
Mountain your cell phone facing down over
your work surface. Now, I'm assuming
that you don't have any specialized equipment for
photography or stop motion. If you do have a tripod or some sort of
cell phone holder, one of those bendy arms. You could use that. You don't. That's no problem at all. I'm gonna be showing you
the basic setup today with a couple large books
stacked up in a tower and a little bit of cardboard to create a little cell
phone tower with kind of like a little mini
diving board as far as your light source. If you're gonna be using
a lamp, that's great. Try to use an LED
bulb if you have it. If not, incandescent
bulb is fine. You'll just see a
little bit of flicker in your animation. If you want to use a
natural light source, if you have a table near
a window, that's great. Natural light is always
makes beautiful shots. You'll see a little bit
of flicker as well, because the sun will be changing position and going in
and out of cloud cover. Here's a couple of suggestions
of tools that you might want to have on hand once
we start our animation. Because we're gonna be
starting with a big pile of salt and we're
going to be turning this into different shapes. So some helpful tools
would be paint brushes. You don't have paint brushes. You could use Q-tips
or toothpicks, playing cards or
just your fingers. But you definitely
would want something smaller for some of the details, like some of the legs,
things like that. And that will make the
animation process a lot easier. Alright, it's time to
go on a scavenger hunt around your house and find
these different supplies. Make sure you've
chosen a light source, a work surface, some way to mount your camera
over your work surface. And don't forget about your animation medium that we spoke about in
the last lesson. So you'll also need to gather some salt or some sugar,
whichever you've chosen. And in the next
lesson we're going to be setting up our shot
and I'll see you there.
4. Setup and Lighting: So here's what the
setup might look like if you're using a table
next to a window, using the window as your
natural light source. And using some books
stacked up to mount your cell phone to take in a couple of layers of cardboard, layer them on top of each other, and weighted them down with some heavy batteries and taking a rubber band to mount a cell phone over the
area as far as possible. Now for coffee table is
what you have to work with. You can make that
work. No problem. You have your tower of books here to hold the cell phone
up and over your work area. We have a poster board down
here for our work surface, just to cut down on some
of the glare that I noticed from the surface of the coffee table that
had a bit of a glaze on it that was taken
away from the shot. And we're using an
artificial light source in this shot to give you an idea of what
it might look like with an LED bulb and irregular lamp. Now, it brings down a pretty, pretty nice amount of light. It's a little bit uneven, definitely brighter on this
side rather than this side. And if you come
into that problem, It's not a huge deal. But if it's really extreme
and your situation and you have a very dark
portion of your shot. You could use bounce card, which is basically a
white piece of paper. This is like a thicker
piece of poster board. And you can set it up on
this side of your shot. And that will bounce
some of the light coming across your shot back in
and make the side lighter. So you might try that if you
don't have poster board, you could use a sheet pan, which would also reflect
some of the light back and just make sure when
you're setting this up and that's out of the shot. And while we have our
poster board here, we also want to make
sure that we're securing all of
these items down. So as you're working, if your arm brushes up
against this and it moves the whole shot that you're creating here on the surface. That'll be kind of
a pain because you would see in your animation,
it would be a jolt. So we definitely want to
secure everything in our shot. Tape this down. I might put a couple of
pieces of tape on the lamp, maybe not not a
big deal on that. And then also making
sure to not jostle, phone, just very delicately
taking each picture. So again, don't get that
jolt in your animation shot, but maybe you don't
have access to natural light source
or an LED lamp. And all you have is
the ceiling lights in the room that you're
working in. That's no problem. We can set it up that way too. We'll just have to
adjust how we mount the cell phones so we don't cast a shadow on our work area. So instead of the tower of
books that we were using, this is not gonna be
a tech, technically, a top-down shot, just going
to be at an angle here. If you had a cell phone arm
flexes cell phone arm thing. You can do that
and just play with the positioning until there's no shadow in your work area. And you could also use a little cell phone tripod
here and do something similar. Just handle that over
your work surface. Here we have a coffee table, we have a light source, but we might not have a
bunch of big books around to create a book tower to
mount our cell phone on. So we're using the
coffee table as an overhang to get
the cell phone over and above the work area without
casting a shadow onto it. And for the work surface, I've decided to use a
cutting board on the floor. You could use poster board. The cutting board just seemed
a little bit more sturdy, so I decided to use that in
this, this setup example. So the point is that there are a lot of different
ways to set up your working area depending
on what you have on hand. He doesn't have to be fancy
tripods or fancy lighting. And we've accomplished this
just with furniture around the house and some
things from the kitchen and just a regular old lamp
5. Reference Videos: These are the
reference videos of the different animals that
you could choose to animate. And they're very small. Files are about seven or 8 mb each who are downloading
to a desktop. The files are small enough
that you could attach them to an e-mail and
send them to your phone, or you could download
them right to your file. I'm going to show you
these three videos in Procreate because this
is the drawing app I use to create these
reference videos. So we'll start with the horse. I'm going to show you these in landscape orientation just so that you can see it
bigger on the screen. But when you download it and
upload it to your phone, you're going to see
in portrait mode, this is a silhouette
of a horse in this video is made up
of eight frames of different poses
that played back at a fast enough frame rate will bring this in these
pictures alive. So you'll see for the different
poses that I've chosen, made sure to include a
frame each time a different leg contacts the ground anytime there's a major change
in the body position. So that when played
back at a faster rate, you'll see all of the major poses that
make up that run cycle. Okay, so that's the horse. And let's take a
look at the cat. The cat at full extension up in the air and contacting back leg, launching off the back legs
and up to full extension. And this is what it
looks like looped. Last but not least, we have a giraffe. So you'll notice that there are three very different body types in these three different
animation files. The giraffe is a much
stiffer movement, and the cat or the horse. But you'll notice
that all three of these animals contact the
ground in the same way. So when the rear of roof of
the horse first contacts, you'll see left
rear, right rear, and then right
front, left front. So that's the way
the sequence goes. It goes left rear, right, rear, right from left front. And that's the same for the cat and the
giraffe dogs as well. And you'll notice how
the body mass changes. When cat is up at
full extension, up in the air, everything gets a lot thinner
and stretched out. And then when the cat is contacting the ground and getting ready for the next
launch up into the air. It's kinda like a spring. Cat's body is all
pressed together, ready to let out that energy to the next leap onto the
unique things about the giraffe is as the
giraffe goes through, It's run cycle the neck of
bends up and bends down. And that's one of the
movements that I wanted to make sure to capture in these different frames so that you can get
a sense of gravity. And whether the giraffe is up off the ground and the
neck is bending up. Or whether all the weight is coming down into the ground
and the neck bends down. So these are some
of the interesting body movements that you'll get familiar with as we go
through this animation. So go ahead and decide which
animal you'd like to handle me today and we'll move
on to the next section.
6. The Stop Motion Studio App: It's time to download the Stop Motion app that we'll
be using for this project. So open up your App
Store on your phone. I'm gonna be showing you this
quick tutorial on an iPad. So things might
look a little bit different though when
you're in your App Store, we're going to search for, you could just type in stop motion. Search. Stop motion. Stop-motion studio comes up. That's the one
here on the right. I've already downloaded
it, so it says open. This is a free app. You don't have to purchase
the paid version for 599. That does give you some extra
features and we won't be using those during this lesson. So you can just download
the free version. But this is the home screen
you'll see on your phone. Because the phone screen
is a little smaller, I'm going to see
some of these icons. I moved around a little bit
compared to the iPad view. What I would do first is
over on the left-hand side, I would touch the icon that
looks like a light bulb. And that's going to
bring up some tutorials. I would recommend to at least watch the Get Started tutorial. That'll give you a little
bit of an overview of the different screens and the different
tools in this app. And once you've watched
that quick video, we are going to
start a new project. A new movie from the home
screen will click new movie. Right now I just
have a live view of desk here on the phone. You're gonna be seeing two
different screens because there's not enough room to fit everything into one screen. So you'll be seeing a live view, but you won't have
a little red dot over on your right-hand side. You're going to have
a little camera icon up on the right corner. And when you touch
that, then you'll be in your live capture view. And that's where you'll take each photo for the animation. One thing that we need
to do is we need to go back from our live view
and on the left-hand side, and you're going to
see a little wheel, and that's a Settings icon. We're going to touch that
and that's going to bring up your frame rate, which is going to dictate
the speed of your video. We want to set that to eight. That means eight
frames per second. And we're making sure that that matches our reference video. When I walked through the
animation of the horse, we're going to be animating eight different
frames of the horse. And each time we take a picture, we want the pose of the horse
to move to the next frame. You have to make sure
that the settings of eight frames per second
matches the reference video. So once you have that done, then we're gonna go
to Aspect ratio. We're gonna be shooting
this project in the default 16 by nine mode. And then when we export, we're going to rotate the video so that it is
in portrait orientation. That'll make it easier to share on most social
media platforms as far as Instagram or
TikTok or YouTube shorts. If we were to try to shoot in portrait mode on the app because of the AP operates
in landscape mode, we would have such
a small work area that it makes more sense to shoot in a full frame and then rotate it
in post-production. So we have our aspect ratio set, we have our speed set. We want to go over here
to the little fork. If you have just
the free version, I don't believe that
you have access to for k or raw video quality, but
we don't need it anyway. We're just going to
select HD video, full HD quality done. The other thing
that we need to do is go into the camera view on your phone where
the red button is and the lower left-hand corner, you're going to see
a little grid icon and hold that down to a long press on
that and you will get to the guides of screen. Now in the guides, you could add a grid to help line up
objects in your shot. We are going to add a
clip of video clip. We're going to take the video
clip that we downloaded from the resources
portion of this class, whichever animal you chose. And we're going to upload that if you haven't
uploaded anything yet, since this is an app that
you just downloaded, then you'll be prompted to give your app access to
your photo album. Or you could choose
whichever video, clip or photo that
you'd like to upload. Once you do that, you'll have your
video clip here. We want to make
sure that this has downloaded onto your
phone at eight frames. So I'm just going to
drag a little bar down on the timeline here and count how many frames
are in this clip. 12345678. Perfect. Okay, so we'll import that. Now this is set up as a guide. We can hit Edit in the
upper right-hand corner. We can set the opacity, how transparent you want it. And I like to keep it right
around 50 so that I can see the work surface even less
than that would be good too, depending on what you're
using for your work surface. As long as you can see pretty good definition
of the animal shape and also see the salt or whatever medium you're working
with. And that's fine. Set that. I will be adding a
grid just to help me set up a camera in line
everything up in the shot. And I think I'll be using
a few more lines for the grid because
the work surface that I'm using is
a cutting board. There are some horizontal lines that I'm going to line
up with this grid. And then once the cameras
set on my work surface, then I will remove the grid. We have our guides
all set and ready. Let's go in the upper
left-hand corner and go back. Once you have your cameras setup over your work surface and
you've lined it up the way you want it to long press the
icon in the lower left and just press the grid and
hit Delete and go back. If you just short
pressed that grid icon, it just removes the reference
layer for a second. If you need to check
your work surface without the overlaying
layer here. So that's pretty much
it. We're gonna do a few more cameras
settings once you have your work surface all
setup with your camera looking straight down
at your surface, and that's in the lower
right-hand corner. Those 3 bar will be
setting the exposure and the focus and getting all that setup when
we start animating. So we'll do that
in the next video.
7. Let's Animate! pt 1: It's finally time for the animation portion
of this project. We've done all the
preparation needed. It was a ton of prep and it's going to pay off in
the end because now we get to the actual fun animating and we
don't have to think about all of the
lighting and the setup. We've got all that ready to go. And I'm going to start
doing a screen recording here so that you can
see each shot composed. On the work surface. You'll see my hands in
here with a couple of different paint
brushes as we move around the salt to create all
the different animal poses. And I'll be walking you
through my thoughts as we go. So you can get an idea
of whether you using the same reference images as I am or you've chosen a
different animal to animate. We going to use a lot of
the same theory as far as how animals move
through running sequence. So I'm really excited. Let's jump into it. Here we go. So apportioned out about a
quarter cup of salt onto the work surface and
roughly moved it around to cover the main
bulk of the body here. And I push it out
a little bit of a sprinkles as well for
the main and the tail. Now that I have all the
different materials in the shot that
we're going to use. What I wanna do is
set a couple of settings on the app here so that we have our
white balance correct, and our shutter speed
and ISO settings. And then we want to
lock all of those. So we're gonna go to the
bottom right-hand side of the screen and touch
the filters area. Now what pops up
here is that we are set into autofocus and
exposure right now. We can go in and manually set each one of these
things if we need to. But what I noticed when I hit
the M for manual settings, that if I were to play around
with the white balance and the focus and
the ISO settings. I really can't get much
better than what the auto, auto settings are
doing right now. So we seem to have a
pretty good balance of light and shadow
and the white seam, why the colors are popping? Everything seems in focus. So what I'm gonna do
is I'm just going to leave these settings. I don't want them
to continuously adjust with each frame or as
my hand comes into the shot, I don't want the focus to change like that, like it just did. So we're going to lock these auto settings in so that each shot is exactly the same. So AL here, lock
focus and exposure. That's all we're gonna do.
We're gonna make it easy. You can always look through all these manual settings and mess with those if you want, see if you have a different style or mood that you want to
create with your shot, That's a darker or lighter, more contrast each shot. But I'm going to stick with just the easy auto settings
here, and we're done. The bottom left-hand
corner here, I'm going to turn this
grid off for a second. Let's take a quick look
at what we have going on. I can see the detail really well in the salt
and in the sprint goals. And actually the writing
here is nice and clear. So nowhere in focus and I
like how everything looks. Now we're going to start
moving the salt around into the different
animal shapes, making very sure that
we don't touch any of these props, accidentally
bumped them. Because then you'll notice
that in the final animation. So we're going to move
deliberately and find some patients to start some
of this little detail work. I'm going to turn the
reference photo back on, but I want to turn
this grid off. I just pop that
grid on there for a second because I wanted
to make sure that the lines in my cutting board were parallel with the
borders of the frame. We're going to
push this grid and the lower left-hand corner. We're going to hold
it down. And the grid over on the
right-hand side, we're just going to touch
that to make it disappear. And that looks good.
Opacity looks good. Then we're all set. So this frame, I'm going to
start off with my big brush. And the pose that
we're gonna be working on the horse right now is
completely up in the air. All the legs are off the ground. It's at the top of that as high as it would get
in the air during this run. See the main and
the tail kinda look like they're floating as
if they were in water. Kind of like suspended
anti-gravity here. So we're at the top of the shot. And then after this, the body is going
to start coming down so feet can contact, the host, can
contact the ground. And as that happens, the main will change and
the tail will change. But for now, we have
this pretty cool shot. We're just going to start with the main bulk of the body here. That's where we're going
to have most of the salt. And we're just going to move that around into
the general shape, try to match the edges
of the horse here. It's kind of imagining
where the body stops and the main starts there. You could do with a
little bit heavier amount of salt in the big body areas, in just a little
bit thinner layer of salt around the legs that'll allow us to get
that fine detail. So I've pulled some of the
salt up to the middle. This is thicker,
Thinner right here. Alright, We're just going
to work our way around. Kinda push that into place. Basically, we're starting
with very broad movements, just getting a rough idea of
how things look in as we go. We'll get more detailed
until everything looks good. This first shot can be
a little bit fiddly because this is the most amount of work we're gonna
do with a solid is turning it from a pile of
salt into the horse shape. After that, it's just
a matter of changing the leg positions and slightly moving up and down
the position of the body, as well as the position of the main and the
tail, the sprinkles. So those won't
take as long as we only have eight frames to do so. Imagine that this would
take less than an hour. We'll see as we go, we're going to walk through this
first frame together. And then in each
consecutive frame, I'll just give you an
overview and the beginning of how I'll be changing
the assault position. And then we'll just speed it up so that you can still see it. You don't have to sit through
each brushstroke here. So whether you've chosen to animate the horse along with me, or a giraffe or a cat. Going to find that although animals have
different levels of, describe it as stiffness in their legs like the
giraffe in the horse, definitely have
more stiffness in their joints compared with
the flexibility of a cat. And the positions that
the cat gets into. Across the room cycle, you're going to
notice that the legs move in the same order. So in the following shots, you'll see that as the
back legs contact. It'll be back, left, back, right, and then front
right, front left. So go left, right, right, left, left,
right, right, left. That's pretty much the
same for dogs and cats, and giraffes and horses. Probably many other four-legged. Imagine bunnies would be different because
there's more of a hop. Maybe both of their backlinks exit the ground
at the same time. Alright, I'm noticing here, I'm just going to turn the
reference image offers second, just to check, this kind
of allows me a better, a better look here. I think I put too
much salt down in the legs are very, very bulky. So what we'll do
is we'll just take this card and we'll just kinda take a layer off of there and push
it out to the body. Will do the same thing
with the back here. Turn that reference image back. I'm kinda alternating
between looking at the image through my phone screen and looking down
at what I'm doing. On the surface, can take a minute to kind
of get used to doing that, but that allows me to kinda keep checking my work as I go and see
how it looks in screen. And also see how the salt
actually looks without the reference image
laying over it. That's around outlet rear here I'm going to start switching
to a smaller brush for some of these finer details. You can do this with
the playing card, or even with your fingers. With toothpicks or Q-tips
wherever you have. Good, make it work. Let's extend this roof here. Chest pain looks pretty good. I'm not the head does that
pretty much in place? It looks at a screen
and it looks like it. But then when I looked down
at the actual work center, so it looks kinda kinda like
it needs a little work here. Like lumpy horse, some
of this back part down. And that'll look a lot
better once we put the main in there. Let's just touch up
these lines here. On the back. What kind of
way around the outside of this silhouette kit that
I was going to say elbow, but we'll just say like Julie, as you can tell, I'm not an expert in animal anatomy and just do enjoy watching them and seeing how they move.
Think it's pretty cool. There's this part in here which is kind of a space between where both of the legs overlap. We are going to make that space with the backside of
the paintbrush here. We do that with a toothpick to allow this Ms back shape to look more like two legs. Some definition there. Let's pull some of that salt back into the main body. Alright, this lagging a
little bit of work so well. Fill that out a bit. A little bit of salt there. If you're a coffee drinker, want to be aware of
how much caffeine you consume before doing
this type of work? I noticed that if I over
caffeinate and then try to do these fine motions
that I get a little shaky. Let's keep these last few
details here on this leg. It's looking a bit rough. Separate it from where
the roof almost touches that other leg up there. Make that bend more accentuated. All right, how are we looking? Smooth that out a bit. Okay, Now we're just gonna do a little bit of a family part. And that's just kinda
touching up the body. Getting some of this loose saw, kinda push it back
towards the animation. Being careful not to, not
to hit the actual animal. Kinda clean it up a bit. Right in there. It'll help define the shot. Now, if you look at the
surface of the solid, you'll see various lumps and textures from where
you move things around. It doesn't have to
be perfectly smooth. But what we do want to
make sure is that in each different photo that
that change is slightly, that'll give them
this main body of the animal that more
of a sense of movement because as each image changes, like I was saying, this body is just going to
move slightly up and down and maybe change shape slightly but not nearly
as much as the legs. So if we were to change the position of the legs
but not really touched, say the salt in the middle of the main mass of the
animal right here, does come out a
little bit funky. It looks a little, little
off the final animation. So the way that I
get around that is I just make sure that
every part is touched. My kinda just pad it around. And then I'll do that again. Just kind of as a
finishing touch before I take each
frame picture. So this is looking pretty good. You can see the definition legs and try not to get
too, too picky. But I just noticed
these little things like leg looks a little
bit too rounded. We want to make it a
little bit more angled. More a sharp. Yeah, I think I like that now we can we could do the
ears and then the main. So I was debating whether or not to animate the ears but salt
because they're going to be so close to the sprinkles
that I think that they might just kinda mixing with
the sprinkles as we go. But I'm gonna give it a
try and see how it goes. Up a little salt there. And then split that
into two years. It looks okay. Okay. Now let's move the
sprinkles in place. I think don't use
playing card for this. Just going to scoot
them down here. And the tail. I call these sprinkles,
but I think on the bottle they're
actually called non parallels because they are little circles and
sprinkles tend to be that oblong or
cylinder shape. But either way, I think that you could do it with
that other style sprinkle. I just picked these
because they are the smallest granule
that I could work with. Kinda get some more detail
in the different way, the portions of the
tail and the mean. Right back to the
little brush here. So we're just kinda
pull out a little bit of trying to create these little wavy bits here. Kind of give some
life to this mean. We don't have to follow the reference image
to a T. I think the important thing to note is the change in movement
as we go through each. So if you understand the concept of how the lighter
portions of the body, like the hair, the
main and the tail, moves up and down. As the animal moves up and down, you can just get a general, general position
here and then just adjust it up and down to your liking in each,
in each photo. More angle to this Looks good. The only thing that's kinda standing out as odd
to me is that the main would kinda go up up
between the ears here. And I think that's gonna be
kind of difficult to do. Still keep that year shapes. So I'm just gonna get
rid of these ears as if Maine was so bushy that this horse is running so fast that the ears are
just kind of back, kinda laying in a back position. Just not seeing it much
in this type of shot, since this is a silhouette shot. Not going to get
all the details, but we're gonna get
a really good sense of animal and the action
that that animal is doing. So just push that
forward a little bit less if it's covering up. Horses got pretty wild,
mean little fiddly. But again, that's just
gonna be a lot more in this first shot then
the following shots. Remind yourself of that patient and it gets easier as we go. And the end result is
going to be pretty cool. Right Now for the tail, we've got the general shape. We're just gonna
do the same thing, kinda fill out a couple of these wavy portions to
give it a little bit of life. We need a little bit
more sprinkles here, where it attaches to the body. It's narrow. Okay, that's not too bad to try to handle these parts and make it maybe a little bit
of a point to them. If you chose to animate the cat, I think they could still work in a different color material
if you were wanting to do something like that, maybe use some
sprinkles for the tail, just give it a little
bit more color. And the giraffe has that mean. Then some hairy parts at
the end of the tail that you could animate with
sprinkles if you wanted to. I think that looks good. Let's take a look at
our work surface. Everything is pretty clean. We're pretty much ready
to take this shot. We've set all of our cameras
setting was locked in. So all we need to do now is make sure that we do a very gentle
touch on the cell phone so that when we touch the
screen to take the photo, that we're not jarring it. And there we go. So we've taken our
first photo. Go back. You can see it's right there. Now we're on to
the second frame.
8. Let's Animate! pt 2: Okay, For frame to, this is where the actual hands-on animation
really starts. I kinda consider frame
One more of a setup because we had to build
this whole character here. So now we just got to focus on the
movement a little bit more. What I'm gonna be
doing in this frame is The back leg is going to
be extending a little bit because these are
going to be contacting the ground first. So I'll be moving assault
into that position. And the front legs are still
starting to pull forward, extending, getting
into that position where that will extend right now they're still
just moving forward, tucked up under the body. The chest is a little
bit more forward and sway in the back is
dropped down a little bit. And the main is starting
to drop a little. And the tail moved a little bit. So That's basically what we're going to address
in this frame and I'll speed it up just to give you an overview of
what that looks like. Hello. Okay. I think we're
pretty much set to take our second picture. I'm going to take a quick
look to see compare it with the first one just
to make sure we've got movement and all
the textures slightly changing in the salt to create an added
field of movements. So we'll go behind the back
arrow in the upper right. And then we'll just slide these two images
back-and-forth. Slight change in everything. It looks like. I like that. I'm definitely noticing
that unless the bumps in the camera between the first
and second frame there. And also that, that first
image is a little darker. We'll try to fix that
up in our editing. After we take all the pictures, see if we can lighten
up that first one and maybe maybe crop it or move
it around a little bit, if not no big deal, but I'm not going to go back
and do that all over. Let's see how we can
touch it up at the end. Alright, ready for
that second photo? Boom, there we go
onto the third one. I want to pause
before we animate the next frame just to address a little issue that I
came across in case you experienced the same
thing during your animation. I had to step away
from my work for a second and I needed
my cell phone. I had to take it off
of the mountain here. And the issue with that is when I tried to put
it back in place, if I don't get it in
the exact right place, then the next frame is going to be slightly
off and you're going to see a jump in the animation when we play
that back at the end. So I'm going to show you
real quick how you can use the onion skin feature
in the Stop Motion app to line your shot back
up and keep going without it looking like you had to remove the camera from the scene
and then bring it back in. Okay. So I've put my cell
phone back on. It's Mt We're seeing the live
view on the surface. And we have our reference
image overlaying the surface. We want to get rid of
that for a second. So bottom left hand
corner of screen, what that grid just make
that disappear for a second. Now we can see what
we're working with and there'll be a little
bit easier to line up. The onion skin feature is on the upper left-hand
side of the screen. There's a little box
with a one on it. If you push that,
that'll select how many of your previous
images you want. Overlaid your live view. So it's like a
sandwich basically. You'll see these
different layers of different images you can right here from
the previous pose. And sometimes when you're animating people
like to use that to see how they want to pose their current image based on what their last
image looked like. If they want to figure out
how far to move a leg, sometimes they
want to be able to use the previous
image as a reference. I prefer to just toggle back and forth to see if I have a good movement
between images. But you could use the
onion skinning two. So we're going to use it to fix this issue of
realigning our shots. We can keep working
on our animation. We don't need to
have three images. We don't need to
have five images. In the upper left here. We just want to have
one previous image overlaying our live review. The slider on the
left is going to adjust the opacity of
the previous image. Hence the name onion skin, like a semi-transparent layer. We have the little
muffin cups here. Just moving my phone
back and forth until I find something that
matches up pretty well. And this looks like
it's in focus. So I'm going to leave
that one alone. And I shouldn't do it. One other thing that we might want to check if you've had to turn your app off or
turn your phone off, is sometimes your
your camera settings might have gotten reset. So in the bottom
right-hand corner, we'll go to Settings. And we just wanted to
lock those auto settings. And again, auto lock.
One other thing. We're gonna go back arrow on the upper right and over here on the left
are going to hit the, we'll make sure that our frame rate hasn't adjusted to the default
freight, right? We still want eight
frames per second. So that when we
take each picture, we'll see a new reference
image overlaying each picture. Since we have eight reference
images, should be all set. Back to the animation. I'm just tidying up frame three. And this frame, the back leg contacted the ground so they
moved the back legs forward, remove the front legs
forward a little bit. They're still moving
along their path to extend before they make
contact with the ground. A whole body in general
is dropping a little bit. As the weight goes
onto this rear leg, we're dropping
down the rear end. We're slightly
adjusting the hair on the main and the
tail down a little bit to create the
illusion of gravity. And making sure that
all of the salt has been slightly moved to create
another movement illusion. Go ahead and take that shot. Now for frame for the second rear leg is going
to be contacting the ground. So we'll adjust those. Continue to move the tail down and adjust the
main a little bit. We'll make some up and down just to create
some variation. Now this front right
leg is extending forward and that's gonna be
the next leg to contact. So we'll adjust that. And frame four here we go. On to frame five. Make contact with
this front right foot and back leg is
leaving the ground. We have weight on one back leg and starting to put
weight on one front legs. So the weight is going to start shifting from the
back to the front, which means the mass is going
to be a little bit more up over the shoulder
area and the chest area. So we're going to shift
some of the salt that way and adjust the legs and make sure that we move all the salt and just
the hair a little bit. And that'll be that frame. Here we go. Okay, here's 55. All ready to go. Capture that. And frame six now both of
the back legs are lifted off the ground and all
the weight has shifted to the front legs. So we're going to start
raising the rear backup. And the mane and tail are
going to start raising backup. So we'll bring some
of the Body Mass back and upward here. And I'll take care of frame
six times sculpt frame seven. Frames seven. We have one front leg
touching the ground. Everything else
is up in the air. So horses body is still
shifting its weight forward. We have a lot more weight and a lot more of the body
mass over the front of the front leg and adjust
these light positions here. Back legs are starting
to separate a bit. That's pretty much it for
frame 72 more frames to go. And then we will be able
to loop this animation. We just took frame seven and now the silhouette
is frame eight. This is the last frame we need
to sculpt. Very exciting. After this, we'll be able
to do some touch ups and see a final animation and
bring this horse to life. So in this final frame, we're going to be
moving the salt up a little bit. Horse is. This pose is one of the
highest poses off the ground. So the hair is going to be looking like it's floating up a little bit
on the tail in the main. All of the legs are off the ground and the
whole body position in general is going to be
shifted up a little bit. We have gone through
eight frames. And now we're gonna do
the finishing touches
9. Basic Editing and Exporting: Let's take a look and see if
we have any editing to do on our project before exporting
from Stop Motion Studio. I'm just going to
scroll through the timeline here and you'll notice that I'm filming this
again on an iPad. Just for ease of
screen recording. In order to walk through
this tutorial with you. My phone ran out of space. My phone rang out
of storage space to perform any length
screen recordings. So I'm just going to show
this to you on an iPad. Again. As when we
walked through the app, a couple of buttons will be in different places on your
phone when you watch this, but it should be pretty
easy to follow along. I'm going to start
out by scrolling across the timeline on the bottom of the screen just to take a look at these images. And with my project, I definitely ran into a few opportunities
for improvement. I guess we could call
these the background. It gets jostled around,
as you can see, when I scroll through these
first couple of frames, the color or the lighting
changes a little bit. Between the first frame and
the rest of the frames. I'm going to try to adjust
both of those things. Trying to get rid of the jostle in this animation is gonna be
a little bit more in-depth. So first I'm just going to
walk you through how you can export your project with just a little bit of
tweaking if you'd like. So first we're going
to select an image. So I'm just going to
push frame one there. I'm going to hit Edit
with a paintbrush. In the upper right hand corner. If you click the word edit, you're gonna get a bunch
of different options on things that you can
do with your images. You can rotate your frame
here or you could do that. Once you export your video. If you want it to
do that in the app, you just scroll to negative 90 degrees and then you have the portrait
orientation, which is how this
is going to look. If you were to share it
on social media platform. But I don't want to go through eight different images
and rotate each one. So what I would do is
save that until I export this looping video onto my phone and then I
will just open it up in the photos app to a basic at it and
rotate it 90 degrees. Other options
mirroring alignment. We're not going to
need any of those. Some of these
filters you see here are only available on the
paid version of the app, but I'm not going to use
any of those anyway. I might try to adjust the
color a little bit and see if I would like any
different vibrance. I kinda like the color with
the sprinkles already, so I don't think I
really want to make it look too unnatural
or to oversaturated. I'm just going to
leave that alone. And then the little
sun icon there tells you that you could adjust the light and make your
image darker or lighter. Not going to use opacity. I'll keep it pretty simple.
I don't think that I would really mess with the color and the lighting
levels too much. We set the lighting and the exposure pretty well
before we started our project. And that's going to reduce the amount of editing
that we have to do. But if you do come
across the issue where one frame is way lighter
or darker than the others. You could adjust the lighting and select that frame
and tried to match. The other frame is try to bring the lighting up or bring the lighting down a little bit just to make it a
little bit less noticeable if you do
run into the issue or you notice one of your frames
is a little bit lighter or darker than the others
and your animation, you could bring the shadows
up or down a little bit to try to make that frame a little bit less noticeable
when you play it back. So once you've done any
adjustments that you need to do, we want to make our
animation at least 3 s long as to be 3 s in order to upload a
video onto Instagram. At this point in time. We're gonna do that real quick. What we'll do is just select either the first
or the last frame. I'm just going to click on
the last frame, hit Select. And then I'll drag the timeline all the way back to frame one. So all of these frames
are highlighted. And push that again. Now I'd like to copy
those eight frames. And I'm going to drag all
the way for him eight here, I'm going to drag to
the live frame and I'm going to click on it and
I'm going to hit paste. Now we have two loops. Animation loops twice. I think I want to
do just duplicate these two loops and have it
play through four times. So again, I'm going to
select the last frame. I'm going to scroll all the
way back to the beginning. Touch that first frame. Hit Copy. Attach
that to the end. Paste. Now let's play it back and
see what it looks like we hit Play underneath
the Record button here. And that's pretty cool.
Seeing the looping animation. They're seeing your
animal running. And it's a really
noticeable how, how poorly I did keeping my set from moving around
as I was animating. And so the next
thing that I'll do is just share this information. So quick little, little share button on
the bottom right here. And it gives you the options to export as a movie or a GIF, or as a series of images. I would export this as a movie. Select, Save Video. Now that's gonna be saved on my photos app to
app on my phone. Then I would open the video
on my phone and just edit that video and just flip the image so that
it's right-side-up. Then you could upload
that to Instagram
10. Advanced Editing: Now let's go back into the
video and we'll take a look at what I would do to fix some of these
jumpy frames here. So I'm going to
select frame one. And I'm going to use the Erase option just to the
right of the edit option. I have four different icons
on the top right here. Little eraser with a minus sign, eraser with a plus
and then a little, little rectangle and
then a brush size. So I'm going to
click the rectangle, and this allows me to
select a masking frame. So basically, what I'm doing
here is I'm going to lay one image on top of the other and I'm going to
erase the portions. The image on frame one
that I don't like, which reveals the
image underneath it, the parts that I do like. So I'm basically going
to be erasing around the horse frame and bringing in the background from all
of my good pictures, getting rid of the background
that's misaligned. So I'm going to use the masking frame a little
bit later in the animation. Once everything stopped moving around and it was good color, it's going to make it easier if I don't have the
limbs fully extended because I want to trace around this body as
close as possible. Alright, that's good. So
we'll go with the last frame. That'll be unmasking
frame and hit Done. And we're going to use the subtracting eraser and will just adjust the
brush size here. We're going to use a
pretty thick brush because we're going to
start from the outside in and will minimize the
brush size when we get closer to the horse body so
that we don't erase too much. Alright, so I'm going
to start over on the rolling pin side and show
you what I'm doing here. Getting rid of that rolling pin, revealing the one
underneath that, unlike giving a good amount of space around the horse image. Now I'm going to reduce
the brush size as I get closer to the
body of the horse. Who want to get rid of as much of this darker colored
background as I can here. Zoom in a little bit. Now I'm showing
part of that tail. I don't want that, so I'm going to undo, that will undo the
last brush stroke. It's not going to undo your
whole project unless you didn't lift your finger
up for a long time. So best to just do
a little erasing. Lift your finger up
a little bit more. If you make a bad brush stroke, then you can just go
back and undo that. I'm getting as close as I can
tell the horse's body here. See how close I can
get over in this area. You can see that I'm revealing
that which I don't want. So undo undo Qur'an, the legs. The other leg under there,
we don't want that. Reduce the brush
size a little more, maybe a little bit more
around the, the main. So that line is not so obvious. Let's see how this
looks. Not too bad. Let's go with it. Image 34567, heat,
but let's go back. Take a look at what image
one looks like now. So I'm going to drag
image1 right over. Next, image five, just so it's easier for
me to scroll back and forth to see if the background
looks pretty decent. Not bad. The coloring
of the salt portion of the horse's body is
definitely different. Frame three also has
some sprinkles up by the cupcake liners that
I want to get rid of. So I'm gonna do this process
again with frame to frame three in frame for so that they all match up
with 567.8 pretty well. And I'm gonna do that
and then just show you the finished product since
you're already walked through how to do
that with frame one. These frames, I'm not
going to have to get as close to the horse when I'm doing the masking
because the background, the cutting board color is not, not a huge difference there. So I will probably
mostly just replace the objects in the corner with the masked image
will be right back. So I have replaced the
background objects and the first four or five frames. Now let's play that back as a loop and see
what that looks like. Still a couple of jumps there, but I'm pretty happy with it was just a personal
project like this. I'll be fine with those
little imperfections. This was a client project. Obviously, I would
have had to redo some of the animation back during the animation phase
of this project. But I do believe that
if you're just creating your own work and
trying to get it out there and gain an audience. That quantity is
something to really focus on and good enough rather than
trying to make it perfect. Otherwise, you'll never
get anything out there and then find the people who are
interested in your work. Now that we have a
finished product, I'll see you in the last lesson.
11. Convert to GIF and Share: So let's rotate that video now and get it ready to
upload to the project and resources section of this class will rotate it in whatever
Photos app you have. And we're going to
take a screenshot for later for thumbnail. Now we're going to upload to
a website called giphy.com. And that's going to create a
looping video with a link so that we can upload
it onto Skillshare, choose a file from
a photo library. And there it is, We're going
to continue to upload with the purple bar on
the bottom right. I'm going to keep that as a
public video so that it's a public link that we can share
and will upload to Giphy. When it's finished uploading, we're going to click
Share in the upper right. And that's going to let us copy the gift link in the project and resources
tab under the class video, we'll publish a project and we'll give our
project a title. And we're going
to click link and paste the link from
giphy.com and add that in. And there's the animation. We'll add a screenshot that we took earlier
for a photo thumbnail, and publishing the upper
right-hand corner. These are very friendly and
welcoming learning platform, so I encourage you to
share your project. It's a great habit
to get into to share your work and
allows you to be more confident and
sharing more work in the future and actually
producing more work overall.
12. Thanks: Thank you so much for
taking the time to make stop-motion
animation with me today. It means so much to
have the opportunity to share what I love
with you and hope you had fun learning more
about animal movement and how to bring animals to
life using food ingredients. Let's take a quick
second to just recap what we learned today. We learned how to create
stop-motion loops with a phone. We awakened our fine
motor skills by sculpting body poses out of
small grained materials. And we used animation tools
that are readily available, like your phone and
objects around the house. We learned how to set up
and light a top-down shot. And we walked through
the exporting and sharing process from
Stop Motion Studio app, we deconstructed animal
movement into basic body poses. We use onion skinning
and masking to fix unwanted camera
movement and light flicker. We utilize reference video to help us animate
lifelike movement. I wish you so much joy and excitement in your
animation journey. Now that you've tackled stop
motion animal movement, I hope the intimidation factor
around animation is way less take on projects
that are exciting to you. Break them down
into simple steps. I really believed
that continuing to create without stressing out about perfection
is the fastest way to improve your skills. I hope this message
sticks with you and allows you to be bold and
brave with your work. And make sure to follow me on Skillshare so you can
catch my next class. If you have any
questions or feedback, I'd love to see them in
the comments section. And I look forward to our
next project together. Until then happy animating
Travis Ashley, Motion Artist
