Stop Motion and Brickfilm

I have always been fascinated with stop motion animation and have started to do small projects on my own (I will post a link to something I have done in one of my future posts).

In case you did not know, stop motion animation is a technique where an object is physically moved to make it look like it is moving on its own. For a while now, I have noticed that the Buzzfeed Food channel uses a lot of stop motion in their videos. I think that is a very brilliant marketing and promotions idea as it is quick and very appealing. This is a video of a stop motion pizza.

Stop motion has had a long life in movie history and it is often seen as a very reliable animation technique. This is one of the coolest stop motion videos I have seen and probably one that took hours and hours to make.

One last thing that I wanted to talk about is brickfilm. This kind of film typically uses stop motion to be created. It is so called because the film is literally made on LEGO bricks or similar small objects.

Brickfilming has been around since the 70s and it uses digital still cameras (DSLRs, etc.). The frame rate is usually 15fps as a compromise between minimum production time and smoothest motion.

Watch this video for a cool brickfilm of the Darth Vader vs Luke Skywalker fight scene.

Water + Sound = Awesome

 

What do you get when you mix Water flowing out of a tube, and a 24hz sine wave sound from a speaker? Nothing but a weird sound, a headache, and a wet floor.... BUT, what if we shot the water, speaker contraption with a camera shooting 24 fps? Well now you get a crazy looking in-camera effect that will blow people's minds!

 In reality, nothing crazy's happening to the water, it's just weaving around a bunch. In camera, however, the water isn't behaving normally. I'm not sure how this works 100%, but I think I have a good idea. Because our camera is only shooting 24 frames per second, we're not capturing all the frames we would normally see. The water is vibrating from the 24hz sine wave, and our camera's capturing 24 fps. Coincidence? I think because we aren't seeing the whole movement of the water, the water looks suspended in mid air.

This works with other frequencies as well. At 25hz, the water appears to be flowing in slow motion, and at 23hz, the water looks like it's going backwards! While this doesn't have much to do with motion graphics, animation, or post-production, I think it's worthy of a blog post. Like Arturo keeps telling us, if you can do something in a camera, do it! I think if you can use this cool trick in an animation, your end result will look amazing!