FilmSkool — a free film school
Stop Motion — the primer
The oldest special effect in cinema and still the slowest: a puppet moved a fraction, a frame shot, twenty-four times for every second you see.
STM · Production · 115 lessons · 29h 16m
What it actually is
Stop motion is animation done with your hands. A real object — a clay figure, a puppet on a steel skeleton, a sheep made of wool, a person — is moved a tiny amount, photographed, moved again. Played back at 12 or 24 frames a second, the stills become a performance. Nothing moves on its own; every blink, every breath, every flutter of a coat was a decision somebody made between two frames.
It is as old as the cinema. Willis O'Brien animated the dinosaurs of The Lost World in 1925 and an eighteen-inch armature into King Kong in 1933. Ray Harryhausen, who saw Kong as a boy, spent four months making seven skeletons fight three actors in Jason and the Argonauts. At ILM, Phil Tippett and Jon Berg walked the AT-ATs across a baking-soda Hoth, and Tippett's go-motion — rods moving the puppet during each exposure, so it blurs like a living thing — gave Dragonslayer its dragon and very nearly gave Jurassic Park its dinosaurs; when CG took the job, his animators drove the digital T. rex with a stop-motion armature.
Then it became a feature form of its own. Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas proved a whole film could be made this way; Aardman built Wallace, Gromit and Shaun out of plasticine in Bristol; LAIKA in Oregon began 3D-printing faces for Coraline and has not stopped inventing since. Wes Anderson and Guillermo del Toro chose it because it looks like nothing else — the slight shimmer of a hand-moved world is a texture computers still cannot quite fake.
What it asks of you is patience and planning. A professional animator on a feature shoots a few seconds a day. So the work is front-loaded: a puppet that holds its pose, a set you can reach into without knocking, a camera and lights that will not change for three hundred frames. Get those right and the animating is the joy. Get them wrong and no amount of animating saves the shot.
What is still being argued about
Live disagreements between people who know what they are doing. You will find confident advice on both sides of each.
- Whether to hide the hand or show it — One tradition polishes the hand away: LAIKA prints thousands of faces so an expression changes as smoothly as a CG one, and paints out every rig. The other keeps the evidence — the fingerprints in Aardman’s plasticine, the fur that “boils” in Fantastic Mr. Fox because the animators touched it, the face seams Anomalisa left visible on purpose. Neither is wrong. The question is whether the audience should feel the craft or forget it, and a good film decides on purpose.
- Ones or twos — Animating on ones (a new pose every frame at 24) is smoother and twice the work; on twos (each pose held for two frames) is the classic look and what most studios use for most shots, going to ones for fast action. Beginners often shoot on ones at 12 fps, which reads the same as twos at 24. The argument is not about quality but about character: twos have a snap and a staccato that ones smooth away.
- Whether it survives the computer — Every decade someone declares stop motion finished — after Jurassic Park most of all, when Tippett himself said he had been made extinct. It keeps not dying, because the thing it offers is not efficiency but presence: real light on real materials. The honest modern version is a hybrid — rigs painted out, skies composited, crowds extended digitally — with the performance still done by hand, a frame at a time.
On the day
Lock everything before frame one: the tripod weighted, the camera on manual exposure, white balance and focus, the lights on and the window blacked out. Then keep your own body out of the light between frames — a shadow from your arm on one frame is a flicker in the finished film, and there is no fixing it without reshooting.
Where to start
- Stop Motion Basics — Shoot something this week — a ball of clay bouncing across a table, on a phone propped on books. Everything else makes more sense once you have felt how small a move is.
- Stop Motion History — Watch O'Brien, Harryhausen and Tippett before you build anything. Their problems were your problems, solved with less, and the solutions still work.
- Puppets & Armatures — The puppet is the instrument. A wire armature that holds a pose and does not spring back is the difference between animating and fighting.
- Animating — Timing, spacing, weight and the arc — the principles every animator learns, applied with your fingers. Use the stand in Tools to practise them.
Read next
This is the plain index, shown because JavaScript is off. Every lesson here is a free video published by the channel credited on it and plays through that channel's own embed — FilmSkool hosts nothing.