My Short Stop Motion Animation.

My and Cyrus put together this short little stop motion using iStopmotion, my DVX100A, and a metal armature I had left over from my Production 2 Film. We found that doing stop motion digitally is practically hassle free, as iStopmotion has a ton of productivity tools to keep us consistent and on track. Also, being able to play the clips back, as we work, in real time was a huge help in keeping our armature in place and keeping the motion fairly lifelike. The entire shoot took only 45 minutes, but me and Cyrus are also both practiced in this form of animation, and us working together cut down production time considerably.

But the truth is that stop motion is almost always more time consuming in the Pre-Production stage because of all the character creation, shot planning, and set production. Actually animating the characters is the fun part, as it's relatively intuitive and generally hassle free as long as you're not shooting on film (which brings with it a very large load of hassles and worries). The one thing I still have difficulty with is timing the gestures in a way that seems lifelike. I often put in a few seconds of buffer room inbetween motions in order to give the audience a moment to breath. This drags the animation out a bit, but I think it diminishes the robotic feel that you often see with lower quality stop motion animation.