Stop-Motion Made Simple: Create Animated Magic on Your Phone | Paul Lalo | Skillshare
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Stop-Motion Made Simple: Create Animated Magic on Your Phone

teacher avatar Paul Lalo, Creative Director/Motion Designer

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Trailer

      2:59

    • 2.

      Values and Inspirations

      2:28

    • 3.

      What is Stop Motion?

      2:19

    • 4.

      Types of Stop Motion

      4:33

    • 5.

      Equipment

      1:47

    • 6.

      Studio Setup

      2:55

    • 7.

      Setting up the App

      6:35

    • 8.

      Let's Practice!

      6:49

    • 9.

      The Brief

      4:04

    • 10.

      The Moodbard

      1:28

    • 11.

      The Storyboard

      3:38

    • 12.

      Let's Animate!

      8:49

    • 13.

      Finishing Touches

      3:04

    • 14.

      Share your Video

      1:28

    • 15.

      Thank you!

      0:49

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About This Class

Dive into the World of Stop-Motion Animation!

Ever dreamed of bringing inanimate objects to life? Join our online course and discover the captivating art of stop-motion animation. Learn from industry experts, Soymilk Studio as they guide you through the essentials of crafting dynamic scenes and unleashing your creativity with the "Stop Motion Studio" app.

Who's it for? Everyone! Whether you're a curious beginner, a content creator, or an entrepreneur, this course is your gateway to expanding your digital toolkit and creating captivating animations.

What You'll Learn:

  • Principles of Stop-Motion Animation
  • Setting up your shooting space
  • Mastering the "Stop Motion Studio" app
  • Crafting mood boards and storyboards
  • Adding finishing touches for professional-quality animations

Ready to embark on your Stop-Motion adventure? Enroll now and let your creativity soar to new heights!

Meet Your Teacher

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Paul Lalo

Creative Director/Motion Designer

Teacher

Hey, I'm Paul. Co-Founder and one half of Soymilk Studio, an animation duo based in Melbourne, Australia. Specialising in mixed-media, we are particularly interested in marrying analog and digital animation techniques. Often combining the latest digital tools with their traditional counterparts, we always strive to get a handmade feel in our work.

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Level: All Levels

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Transcripts

1. Trailer: Brand, Brand A. Hello. We are Jenny and Paul, A start motion do based in Bordeaux, France. Jenny's designer and I'm an animator. Ten years ago, while living in Australia, we joined a skills and funded soy milk studio. An animation studio specializing in mixed media animation. Where we mix our love for the handmade with the latest digital tools and techniques. We have worked with different clients and on various projects from music videos to short films, TV commercials, social media content, and even museum installations. Regardless of what screen it ends upon. One thing we try to keep consistent is our passion for storytelling and the tactile aspect of our work. We also make sure to allow time for personal projects and short films. Our passion for animation is something we just have to share with others, whether it's online or in person. And we believe stop motion is the most fun and accessible animation technique out there, producing unique results and with endless possibilities. In this skillshare workshop, you will learn how to create your very own start motion animations to share on Instagram without the need for expensive cameras and software. All you need is your smartphone app and some asso items to animate with. We'll talk about our inspirations and what got us into stop motion in the first place where start motion actually came from. It's different types now it's being used today. Then we'll talk about the equipment you'll need and some tips and tricks to avoid splurging on expensive gear. Next we'll show you how to set up your very own stop motion studio by stabilizing your camera, placing your lights correctly, and understanding the ins and outs of our Fabrice stop motion app. To achieve professional looking results, we will put theory to practice with an exercise designed to teach you the basic principles of stop motion animation. We will then take you step by step through our entire process for creating a stop motion video for an ethical brand on Instagram. From coming up with ideas with the mood board and the storyboard, to executing the animation and polishing it off with final edits, color correction, and our top expert tips for best results on Instagram. This workshop is designed for anyone looking to create creative content for the social channels. It's perfect for brands, influencers, creatives, and content creators looking to add that magic of stop motion to the visual arsenal, ready to animate. See, you're in the workshop. 2. Values and Inspirations: Because we work as a Duro, our style has matured quite naturally and is really unique to our collaboration. Jenny brings her visual baggage, and I bring mine with her background in product design and craftsmanship. Jenny adds that organic and handmade element to our work. And her sense of color and simplicity is a great complement to my technical knowledge, which is more focused around storytelling and the animated movement. This crossword between my digital background and her craft skills is where we like to spend most of our time to explore ideas and be creative. Finding your style takes time and it's a never ending journey, a topic that could be its own separate workshop. Our advice is to explore as many techniques and styles that inspire you until you can really identify what you enjoy most. For example, a few years ago we ran a style business where we created short animated wedding films that couples would scream to their guests at their wedding receptions. The goal of these films was to create a love story and wow their audience. Making each film was a lot of work, but our couples trusted us completely with full creative freedom, allowing us to explore many techniques and really hone in our style and perfect our skills and craft. The wonderful thing about stop motion is that you can use pretty much any object around you and bring these inanimate objects to life with just a little imagination. The sources of inspirations are therefore endless and will help you reconnect you to your inior child and that sense of fun, play, and wonder. The application for our work has evolved over the years. And while there is a great variety and satisfaction in having all these different avenues for our animations to be shown, we are now yearning for more meaning and impact and have decided to pivot our client based to more ethical brands with whom we share common goals and values. The natural world that surrounds us is a central part of the shared values and plays a big role in our inspirations. 3. What is Stop Motion?: Now we got introduced and you know a bit more about us. Let's define what stop motion actually is and explore what the medium offers in the different types of stop motion you can do. In its essence, stop motion is an animation technique where objects are shot one photo at a time with the objects being moved between each shot. When you string these follows together and play them quickly, it creates the illusion of movement. A great example of the word stop motion, also known as stopping the movement is found in the work of English photographer and pioneer of motion, Edward Moybridge. Moybridge is known for a series of photographic experiments. In one of these experiments, the horse in motion, he wanted to find out if at some point during a horse's gallop, the four hooves would leave the ground simultaneously. The challenge was to catch the horse in the photo so quickly that his movement could be frozen. Moybridge had the ID to high wires, to multiple cameras across the custom made track. The horse would then break the wires as it was galloping past, triggering a series of photographs. The result, a succession of frames that would influence the development of cinema as we know it today. Yes. As proven by more bridge, horses do fly more bridge. Went on to experiment with the popular optical gadgets of the time, the Zpracoscope, the Phantoscope, the zotrope, or the stroboscope. Despite the complicated names, these gadgets work in a similar and simple way by creating the illusion of movement. Using a series of images played in succession to create a moving image. Exactly how we are able to see movement out of steel. Images remains a hot scientific topic to this day. This visual phenomenon, also known as the persistence of vision, or retinal persistence, was studied by Greek scientists and deserve the attention of a certain Isaac Newton. This is the core of More Bridge's work and animation at large. Three main principles that we need to keep in mind to better understand the craft of stop motion are image repetition and speed. We will explore each in the next videos, but for now, let's take a look at the different types of stop motions out there and talk about which one will choose for our specific purposes. 4. Types of Stop Motion: The great versatility of stop motion has allowed many techniques and various processes to develop. In this video, we will take a look at a few different types so you can get a good overview of the possibilities that this wonderful medium offers. Claymation, clay, plasticine, and other malleable materials naturally lend themselves to stop motion. Thanks to the ease of use, you can shape and form clay into anything your imagination can picture. It's only natural that many animators chose this material to give birth to their ideas and stories. Popular examples are Wallace and Grame by Hardman and Bristol. Or Marian Max by Astron director Adam Elliott. Clay also opens the door to more complex character based stop motion with the use of articulated dolls, molds, and armatures to see how far stop motion can be pushed. You can dive into some of the behind the scenes from Wes Anderson or like as feature films. The amount of work and skills required to make this film is just mind boggling object. Another widespread technique, which happens to be our technique of choice for this workshop, is the manipulation of existing objects. This style allows you to be very creative and diverse with your choice of objects. A pencil does not have to represent a pencil. You can become anything you want. A great example of this is the body of work of Pez, who uses a multitude of objects from everyday life to fill his films with visual surprises and eye candy. Literally, pixilation. In pixilation, the object to animate is yourself or not a human being. This technique can be quite physical and requires plenty of patience as you are taking images while maintaining a different fixed posture for each photograph. Resulting in human puppets that can perform in amazing ways. The forerunner of this technique is the legendary Scottish animator Norman Mclaren as sin in his work for the National Film Born of Calendar Cut out another interesting type of stop motion using collage and cutouts. Here you can recycle old magazines, newspapers, cardboard, and other kinds of flat materials to create entirely new two dimensional scenes. The comic animations of Terra Gillum are a good example of what can be achieved with this experimental technique. Paper asin previously for the cut out style paper can play an important part in any stop motion thanks to its versatility and form origamies. And three paper forms are an essential part of our work and can allow you to create entirely new worlds. Some other techniques worth mentioning are Lego, loved by kids and adults, and a great introduction to the world of stop motion silhouette, great for storytelling. And one of the oldest techniques Ain in Lotti Ringer's amazing work, The Adventures of Prince Ahmed from 1926, thought to be one of the oldest surviving feature length animated film paint on glass. Animating paint can also be achieved by manipulating slow drying oil paints on sheets of glass. The best known practitioner of the technique is Russian animator Alexander Petrov. He has used this technique in seven films, all of which have won prestigious awards. Sand, Another beautiful technique that plays with light and form, pioneered by Carolyn Leaf, an undergraduate student at Harvard University, in 1968, she created her first film, Peter under Wolf, by dumping beach sand on a light box and manipulating the grains to build figures, textures, and movement frame by frame. Again, this is just a taste of what is possible with stop motion animation out of these techniques, which is your favorite. Leave a comment below and let us know. In the next video, we will get down to business and talk about the gear and materials needed for you to start animating. 5. Equipment: Before we get started, we need together a few items. In the past, you had to invest in expensive cameras and softwares to create stop motion. While it can be still the case, if you want to go pro, it's no longer an obligation, especially when getting started with smartphones in our pockets that combine supercomputers and high resolution cameras. All we need is the write app and a few inexpensive items. To get started, here's what you will need. First, we need the smartphone. Both iphone and Android will work. Next, you will need to download and install a stop motion app. There are a few at there, but we recommend one called Stop Motion Studio. There is both a free version, Stop Motion Studio, and a paid one, Stop Motion Studio. Fro again, either will work here, but we recommend you purchase the pro version, which costs less than $10 Well worth the price some kind of light to light your scene. This can be a desk light or another artificial light in your room. We suggest you avoid natural light like a window. We'll explain why in the next video. A large cardstock piece of paper for your background. This is optional, but if you have some headphones like the ones that came with your phone, that have some buttons to control the volume, this can come in handy. Last but not least the thing, a stop animator can never have too much of sticky putty to all things in place. Do you have all these items ready? Great. In the next video, we'll put them to use and set up your very own stop motion studio. 6. Studio Setup: Okay, let's now run through the preparation of a basic stop motion set. We will also share our tips and tricks for each piece of equipment. There are four basic elements to any stop motion chute, a space lighting camera, and a software to capture and review our animation. In this video, we will look at the first two elements that have to do with the physical set up of your, namely space and light. A very important principle for a successful piece of stop motion is that everything we do must be under our control. You need to become total control freaks if you aren't we already? What do I mean by that? Let me explain. Starting with the surface we're going to animate on this is usually a desk or a table top of some kind. While a desk is something we can easily control, it can sometimes be unstable. We have a bit of a woble to it, that's when the control freak mode kicks in. A solution is to stabilize the wouble with a piece of paper. You can also tape down the legs of the desk to the floor to avoid any accidental movement whatsoever. To create a clean shooting area, you can use your car stock piece of paper and create a seamless backdrop by taping it to the shooting surface and the wall behind it. You can also invest in larger paper rolls like these if you shoot bigger products. Let's now take lighting, for example. While it could be tempting to set up your desk next to a window to take advantage of that beautiful natural light. This can actually create some issues in your video. Sunlight coming through a window is, by nature, unpredictable, and will constantly be changing due to clouds passing by or just the time of the day changing the lighting conditions. If you have a window, you need to control that light by blacking it out with curtains or a blanket and replacing that sunlight with consistent artificial lights. Which lights to use? You may ask, well, for our purposes, any lights that you have available will do. Lighting is a huge topic and can be a course of its own, But don't worry, we'll keep things real simple here. If you have two available lights, the more powerful under two can serve as a key light will help light your subject. And the other less powerful one will be your feel light, used to fill in the information in the shadows. If you have just one light, then you can use a piece of white cardboard to act as a reflector and bounce some of your key light back onto your subject pro tip. If you have the choice, LED lights are better than incondensing bulbs to avoid flickering and will stay cooler, which definitely helps if you work with materials that are more heat sensitive, like clay for example. We also like using aquel lights because of their flexible bodies and the fact that you can clamp them pretty much everywhere. Lighting is all about experimentation. Play with the placement of your lights, the orientation and their intensity, if they are dimmable, great. We now have a good set up for our stop motion, with our set and lights up. Next we'll talk about how to work with our smartphone and the accompanying app to shoot our stop motion animation. 7. Setting up the App: Okay, let's now run through the preparation of your camera and some settings. You recommend for the stop motion app you will use for a camera. We'll use our smart phone built in camera to take our photos. A good habit is to clean your camera senses before every chute to avoid any fingerprint smudges that can affect your picture quality. A critical step here is to also stabilize your camera so it doesn't move an inch during the T. The best way is to secure it to a tripod with a clamp or phone holder. You can then further secure your tripod by taping or gluing it to the floor to avoid any accidental bumping. You can also place a sandbag or some other heavy bag on the tripod. A rice bag, for example, works really well. Again, this step is key, as the slightest change in your camera position can ruin your video completely, forcing you to start from scratch. We've been there not fun if you don't own a tripod. There are a couple of hacks to stabilize your phone with household items. If you shoot an upright video, you can use a mug and have your phone rest inside the mug or lean against it. Books and tape can also be handy when trying to secure it. If you shoot from overhead, you can use the edge of a table or a chair and shoot down to the floor. Or use a kitchen cupboard when your phone is nice and secure. Interacting with it by taking frames and previewing your animation via the touch screen, cause some micromovements that will show up in the finished piece. After securing it down, you want to avoid touching your phone as much as possible. Here are some different ways you can do so. Use the timer function to have the phone take pictures automatically based on your desired interval. Use the volume button on your wired headphones to take pictures. Use the remote camera function and control all the manipulation via a secondary phone or tablet. Or use a Bluetooth remote to trigger the camera. Again, the key here is to always be in control and minimize the risk of accidents. The last element of our preparation is the software or app we will use to capture the frames of our video and preview our animation as we go. Our app of choice is Stop motion studio by a company called Cat Eater Quick Name. There are alternatives including an app called Live Flaps, which is also worth exploring, especially considering how it uses a more native vertical format better suited for socials. Both live flaps and stop motion studio have three options. But we prefer stop motion studio because of its features and cheaper one off price of 999. As opposed to live flaps, which costs 499 per month or 690 per month. If you go with their yearly plan, we obviously recommend a one time fee of Stop Motion Studio Pro. Otherwise, you can try both free versions to see what suits you best. Whichever app you use, they both work in a similar way. And again, our guiding principle here is to always be in control. So with that in mind, let's dive into the app and show you the settings we use for best results. Okay, so let's launch Stop Motion Studio. The first screen we see is the gallery where all of your videos will live. This is also the screen we will come back to when it's time to export our video. Let's create a new movie. We can now see a live image of our set. This is where all the magic happens at any time. If you get lost in the interface, you can click on the Question mark button to get a quick overview of what each button does. Let's go ahead and first set up our general settings by clicking the gear icon. The first option from the left is our speed. Just like our third principle, remember speed, this is where you can adjust how fast or how many frames per second your videos will be playing back. I'm going to choose 12 frames per second. For now, we can always come back to this menu and adjust this on the fly to get the desired look. Next up is an important option, or we can set our aspect ratio or the crop that will be exported out of the app. Since we are exporting to Instagram, you will want to select either the square format or the portrait format to maximize screen space on Instagram. To get the best resolution from this format, we will next click on the four K button and make sure our quality is set to four K. Up next are the playback options, again, because we are focusing on Instagram here. And we know that by default Instagram will loop all videos. We want to take advantage of this and make our preview a loop playback to simulate how we'll play back on Instagram. That's it. Just click Done to confirm these general settings. Now let's finish up by clicking on the camera settings. This is where we will set up all of our camera controls. Again, our guiding principle of total control here will dictate that we want as much manual control in the camera settings to avoid any flickering. First up is the camera selection. This is where we can select the type of camera on your phone. If you have a recent phone, chances are you will be able to choose from a number of lenses rear front wide, or tell which is your zoomed in lens. Pick the one that best suits you seen Up next is our camera mode. Depending on the mode you pick some additional menu items will be available to control focus and exposure. Let's look at each one. As you guess we want to avoid auto mode entirely. As it will continuously adjust focus and exposure and cause image flickering. Al allows you to tap your screen once to set and lock focus and exposure. Allows you to lock focus but control exposure manually. And gives you complete manual control over exposure and focus. Next is our white balance. This setting depends on your particular scene and it's lighting conditions. Try to different options, incandencent sunrise, et cetera. And pick the one that looks best, the one that gives you the most natural whites. Depending on the mode you have selected earlier, you will see some options for manual controls over focus, SO exposure and shutter speed. This plus icon is digital zoom. You can apply to fine tune your framing. This can give you fix lited results quickly. So be gentle if you use it, or better yet, use your telly lens in the first menu if you need to get closer to the action. The last button gives you handy options to mirror flip your camera, which can be useful for overhead situations. Great job. We've covered a lot of ground. You've learned all about setting up a space for shooting, lighting it correctly, securing your camera. And how to use a Stop Motion Studio app. We are ready to animate now. Lights, Camera action. 8. Let's Practice!: All right, we are finally ready to make things move. We are going to put our new font knowledge to the test and make this bad here. Move by itself, spin around, and then exit the frame. So go ahead and grab any object around you that you'd like to see move. It can be a mug, a piece of clothing, or food item. Anything will work here. To start with, we are going to take an empty frame without the object. The idea here is that we have a bit of time passing before the object slides into the frame. The exact time is up to you. I'm going to make it 1 second long because we have set a frame rate, or speed at 12 frames per second. This means I need to take 12 photos to make 1 second. I could do this manually by taking one photo after another. Or a better way is to tell app to hold or pause this photo. I can do this easily. If I go to my timeline and tap my first frame, a pop up menu will come up. In that menu, I have a pause button. I can then set how many frames I want to hold this particular frame. Let's set a slider to that 12 and tap down to confirm. You can now see a little number in the bottom left of our frame telling us how long this frame is passed for. Let's go back to a live frame and take another picture. But this time I'm going to introduce my vase here into the frame. I want to be very gentle with how much I move the object here and only have it show slightly in the frame. Remember our second principle, right? Repetition. The more frames I take, the smoother my animation is going to look. Let's continue on and take more frames. One thing that can help us here is to turn on our onion skin. What's an onion skin, you ask? Well, onion skinning basically allows you to overlay your previous frame with the current frame creating a ghost image. This can be very helpful to ensure that you are moving your object at roughly the same amount each time. You can actually click on the onion skin button. And it will allow you to switch from seeing just one frame earlier to three frames up to five frames earlier. You can control how visible that previous frame is by sliding a single slider up and down just below the slider. You also have a grid button, which will help you center your object in the frame. Very handy at any one time. We can tap the play button to play back and preview animation and see how it feels. It can happen sometimes that your hand was still in the shot when you captured the frame or you didn't move back far enough, leaving a bit of shadow in the shot. In that case, you'll want to erase that frame. Don't worry. Super easy, just go back to your timeline. Tap the frame you want to get rid of and just tap the let. Okay. I have now got my object right in the middle of my frame. Let's make it spin. I want it to spin three times on the spot. The best way is to make it spin once and then copy your spinning frames two times to save some time. Let's start with the spin. Because the vase initially came in from the left, I want it to rotate counterclockwise to keep its left to right momentum. The trick here is to again, move in a similar increments to have smooth motion. If you think of a clock phase, depending on the speed you want to achieve, you can choose to move in 5 minutes increments for a slow spin, or up to 15 minutes increment for a quick spin. The important thing here is to have the last frame of your spin end at one increment before your first frame. To create a seamless loop, a common mistake is having your object move while it rotates, creating an unwanted jitter. Use your onion skin here to try and stay as centered as possible while spinning. To duplicate my spin, let's go back to the timeline and slide back to our first frame of the spin. Tap that frame and choose Select in select mode. Slide all the way forward in time to your last frame. The selected frames will be highlighted in blue. There's no need to include the life frame in that selection. Once all the frames of your spin have been selected, tap that last frame and select copy. Now tap your life frame and paste. Repeat that paste action again for your third spin. Now you can press play to watch the magic. There you have it. The vase is spinning around. I can now pause the last frame for maybe six frames before the vase exits the frame. Same process. I go to my timeline, tap the last frame, choose pause and adjust it to be six frames long. Now I can go back to the live view and finish my movement towards screen right, so the object exits the frame. Let's play our animation now and it's done. And make sure everything looks right. If it doesn't look perfect, don't worry. It's just practice for now. It'll take a few trials until you get more comfortable with the app and leave the whole stop motion process. Let's now export our stop motion so we can share it around. Let's now head back to the gallery screen where we can see all of our projects in the top right and select your animation. Then tap the Share button and choose Export Movie. You can then choose different Share options, E mail, air drop, Instagram, et cetera. With this practice under our belt, we are now ready to get serious and take on our first proper stop motion project. See you in the next video. 9. The Brief: Now that we have got the technical and practical details out of the way with our practice shoot, we can now focus on the creative possibilities of stop motion. For our first project, we decided to pick one of our favorite brands of the moment and create a short stop motion to promote their Eos and one of their products. We want you to tag along our process so you can learn all the different steps that got into a successful stop motion video and apply it to your own brand or future clients you may have. Our very first step in a brief is what we like to call the discovery and research phase. This is where we learn as much as we can about the brand, its values, and its products. We dig deep here and spend a lot of time on the client's website, their social accounts, and chat with them directly to really understand their needs and wants. For this particular example, we picked a local brand that we would love to work for. This is actually a great way to get started with professional work. If you send your dream client a video you made of their product and you do it well, there are chances that in the future they will actually pay for your services. Our spec client here is called Copan. It is a family owned natural cosmetic brand based in the southwest of France. Their particularity is that they have found a sustainable way to use an abundant natural and local resource, pine trees in their line up of natural cosmetic products. One of their product is using powdered pinecone seeds to create a body scrub. This transformation from pinecone to power is perfect for stop motion video and has strong potential to create Smi catching visuals while still showcasing the natural values of the brain, which also match with our own brain values and target audience. With that in mind, let's talk about five ingredients that you should aim to have in every stop motion video for Instagram. Is it under 15 seconds? Keeping your content under 15 seconds is key to catch the viewer's attention. Are you using four by five dimensions? Four by 5.9 by 16 for stories are vertical ported formats that take up the most screen space on Instagram, allowing your video to really stand out it loop. If you can create a seamless looping animation, you can extend the viewing time of your video tremendously and save yourself from a lot of extra animation work. Is it creative and engaging? A question we always ask ourselves is, can this idea only be done in stop motion? If the answer is no, then we need to rethink our concept. Make sure your ideas fits through the medium. Does it showcase the product and message? Is there a clear messaging or story in our idea? And is the product on screen long enough to communicate what it is we are promoting? If your idea can fit in all these five ingredients, then you have a winner. As mentioned, for our brand, we want to focus on that product transformation and it's linked with the source element, the pine cone. The best way is to find that creative concept is to brainstorm with someone and bounce some ideas. Collect inspirations from a variety of sources. Go outside, step away from the computer. Always refer back to that discovery phase to see if your ideas are a good fit with the brand and its values. In the next video, we are going to create a moodboard and a storyboard for our animation. This will help refine our concept further and solve some of the visual and storytelling challenges of the video. 10. The Moodbard: Now that we understand our Brennan have an idea, let's develop the visual look and feel of the video. We first need to make a list of the elements we're going to source. Again, we can refer to our discovery and research phase here to see what the Brenda has done visually in the past on their Instagram account. What colors do they use? Their style of photography and prop styling, and all of that will influence the art direction of our video. Some brands are specific brand guidelines that you need to adhere to. These documents are really helpful and will often be given to you by their team when you get hired on professional jobs. Here are the items we'll need for our video. The product itself in our case is small glass bottle of the powder, large colored card stock paper for our backdrop. A variety of pine cones, pine cone seeds, pine tree branches, maybe some sand from the beach. Before sourcing these items, we can first collect them in a digital form and create a collage or moodboard to get an idea of how they pair together. It's a good idea to also include the brand logo in the Moodboard, as that can often appear in the video as well. Another thing we'd like to do during this Moodboard step, create a dedicated Pinterest board and collect as many visual references as we can to get inspiration. This can be video photography, artworks, college animation. All of this will help spark visual directions and ideas for our video. Next up is a very important step of storyboarding. 12. Let's Animate!: Let's now put our plan to action with our storyboard. As our guide, we made another document called the Shot List that has each shot listed with its exact duration in frames. We know how many frames we need to shoot to save even more time. It's also a good idea to batch our shots. Do all our front view shots first and our top view shots next, so we don't waste time setting up our camera multiple times by going back and forth between the set ups. Let's start with our front facing shots. Here's what we'll achieve for this first part. First, a view of the product from the front. Remember the lock up, the set elements will come out of the frame and the bottle will start rotating in its own, as in our storyboard. Then it will transform into a pine cone and shrink in size while still rotating. To begin, we'll set up a lock up image. This will serve for our first and last image, our loop animation. Our bottle is well placed in the center of the frame. Don't forget to use the grid here on the left interface to center your object properly. Then we'll add the other set elements, the pine cone to the right of the image, the sand here at the bottom left, and some seeds here and there. After some adjustments in cleaning, we're ready to take our first image. I'll directly extend this first image as seen in the previous exercise by pausing it for six frames, half a second. For my second image, I'll barely move each set element delicately outward from the framing. I'll remember to go back to my interface and take my picture. I'll repeat this operation until all elements completely leave my frame. Remember our second fundamental principle, repetition? The more images I take during this exit, the longer the movement will be. In my case, I took about 1,000 images to remove all the set elements, which amounts to 1 second on screen when we work at 12 frames per second. Once my images are captured, I'll finish with a little sweep while being careful not to touch my bottle in the center. We can now move on to the second part of the animation with the transformation of the bottle into a pine cone. Firstly, I'll activate my onion skin option to be able to rotate my bottle while staying as centered as possible. I'll slowly rotate the bottom frame by frame, ensuring to keep a similar range of movements between each shot. After about a quarter of a turn of a rotation, I'll non create an in between image between the bottle and the pine cone by sticking some pine cone scales onto the bottle using sticky tech. One or two images may suffice to transition between these two objects. The faster the movement, the more effective this image usually works. Now I can remove my bottle and replace it with my larger pine cone. I'll use my onion skin again to align these two objects. The base of a pine cone is not entirely flat, so I'll use sticky tack to keep it upright while continuing my rotation in the same direction. I'll gradually change the size of the pine cone until it's the smallest in the batch. There you have it all. Front facing shots are done. We can now move on to the third and final part of the animation wave, the top down shots. For this part, I'll change my smartphone position to film from the top. Once my camera is securely positioned, I'll send to the pine cone in the frame. I'll also try to ensure that my imation continues to rotate in the same movement as my previous rotation, that is counter clockwise. Here's what we're going to try to reproduce. The idea here is to gradually reduce the pine cone into seeds and into powder. And then to redraw the shape of the bottle with the same powder. To complete the loop, let's start with the scales. I'll arrange them in a circle around the pine cone. At the same time as it continues its rotation, I'll spread the scales outwards and initiate the same rotation movement so that the scales accompany the pine cone. I'll also replace my small pine cone with an even smaller one, possibly more closed to make it disappear further. I continue my circular movement and gradually I'll replace my scale with seeds, then with powder. For even more precision in your manipulations, you can use tweezers. Once we've reached 100% powder, I'll continue the movement until forming a circle around the center of the image. This circle will serve as an anchor point between two parts. This is what we'll see with the disintegration of the scales into powder and the transformation of the powder into a bottle To achieve a very clean bottle shape, we'll start with the end and first create our final image, which will then animate in a circle of motion. Then to achieve a very clean bottle shape, we'll start with the end and first create our final image, which we will then animate in a circular motion. This technique, known as reverse motion, is widely used and allows for a clean and controlled render to better shape and manipulate the powder. I can also use a credit card here or any other rigid support for this. The onion skin technique will also again, be effective here to trace the bottle shape. I'll also add a pause on the last image of the bottle to ensure it's clear and visible to the viewer. There we have it, our animation is progressing well. We just need to add the final touches, see in the next video for those final tweaks. 13. Finishing Touches: To finish things off with our animation, we are going to take a peek at our timeline again. And play our animation to see if we need to do some editing by removing frames or moving them around in our opening shot, for example, we can copy the frames where our set is leaving a frame and paste them in reverse to create a smoother loop. Here it is. Before that added here it is. After a lot better, right? When the movement seems too slow or odd, don't agitate to delete frames and see how it feels. You can always tap the undo button if you don't like the result. You can also add in some fad ins and fade outs directly in stop motion or experiment with filters. While this could be a lot of fun to play with, we actually recommend doing color correction outside of the app and in your native OS for better manual control over these adjustments. But first, let's export our video and save it on our phone. Let's head back to the gallery screen. We can see all of our projects. Tap select in the top right and select your animation. Then tap the Share button and choose Export Movie. You can then choose the Save Video option to save it directly on your phone. Once it saved to my camera role, we can open it up natively on our phone and choose Edit. In this edit view, we are going to tap on the little dial button here. We can adjust our exposure highlights, contrast colors, et cetera. Try to be subtle here as you don't want to alter the image and colors too much. We just want to boost it a little to give the video more pop. Next we want to select the Crop and Rotate menu to further adjust our video. Here you can straighten the image micro, adjust the vertical or horizontal perspective. Or even flip or rotate the image 90 degrees. The most important setting for us is the crop option on the top right of the screen. If we select the vertical crop option first and then pick the eight by ten aspect ratio, this will effectively crop our nine by 16 portrait video to a four by five, which is perfect for Instagram. Adjust the crop vertically to refine your composition and make sure you have everything you want in the frame it down. And we are now ready to share our video with the world. 14. Share your Video: Let's now export our stop motion so we can share it with the world. Open up Instagram and tap on the plus button to create a post. You should now see your recent photos and videos. Select your animation. By default, Instagram will want to crop your video to a one by one square format. To avoid that, we want to tap the Zoom button on the bottom left and force it to our original four by five ratio. You can now hit next. Here you have the options to add filters and trim your video. This shouldn't concern you as we have already made our color adjustments in the previous step and also edited our video in stop motion studio. What we do want to absolutely adjust is the cover image that will be seen on our wall. By default, Instagram will pick the first frame of our video. This isn't always the best image for a thumbnail. So make sure you scroll your video to pick the best frame of your animation. You can then click next. This is where you can add your captions, ash tags, et cetera. You know what to do here. Just make sure to tag us at Soy Milk underscore Studio so we can see your stop motion animations. We love seeing what you come up with, and we'll be more than happy to give you feedback on it, too. 15. Thank you!: All right guys, we really hope you add fun animating. Thank you so much for taking this workshop with us. We hope that you now have a better understanding of the amazing out of stop motion. And that you feel inspired knowing that you can create engaging animations all by yourself. With very little equipment, but plenty of ideas. Remember that the only limitation we stop motion is your imagination. Once you have your animations all done and exported, we would love to see what you came up with. So feel free to post your animations on the workshop page. And if you have any questions, we are always here to help. If you're not already, feel free to follow us on Instagram. We would love for you to tag us at Soy Milk Underscore Studio so that we can see your work. Thanks again and see you next time.