From the course: Learning Stop Motion Animation

Welcome

(electronic, rhythmic dinging) Hi. My name's Rich Harrington. I'm a motion graphic artist as well as a professional photographer, and today I'm going to combine those two things into something I love called stop motion animation. Now, stop motion is a popular technique. You've seen this used in feature films throughout the years for animation, but it's also something you can do on the weekend with your kids. It's really easy and it's a lot of fun, and it doesn't take a lot of tools to put it together. We're going to start by taking a look at some of the essential principles. How does stop motion animation work? Once you understand the core concepts, we'll pull the gear together that you need. Today I'm going to be using a tool called iStopMotion, which is available both for iOS and for the MAC platform. But if you're using a PC or an Android device, there are other tools that are available and I'll point some of those out. It's really important that you're just going to learn the core concepts, and these will translate across really any platform. Now today we're going to start pretty basic. We're just going to shoot with the iOS device using the iPad and a smartphone, but then we'll step up and take a look at a more advanced workflow using something like a DSLR. All of these pieces are easy to put together and all I want you to do is go grab some things that you have laying around the house or office. I literally raided my kids' room and picked up some toys, and this is going to be fun because we're going to bring some of these inanimate objects to life with stop motion animation. Now once we've got all the things captured there's a little bit of processing you could do, getting the movies properly exported and getting them formatted, but when it's all done you'll have movies that are ready to easily share whether you want to put them on the web directly or take them into a professional or semi-professional video editing tool. We've got a lot of things to cover; let's get started.

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