Stopmotion Explosion Blog

Tom Grigat has an incredible YouTube channel dedicated to builds of these miniature 1/72 scale plane models. For perspective, the interior of the plane cockpit fits on the top of a penny! Roden Junkers D.I, 1/72, WWI Alu monoplane Airfix F 86F Sabre, 1/72 Airfix: Fokker EII (late) Eindecker 1:72

Guldies is back! This is our second installment in a series about Swedish claymation animator and sculptor, Alex Unger. You've seen Magic Water, now here is: Magic Soap As promised in our previous post, this time we're focusing on the technique used to simulate a bouncing motion.  You can "levitate" the bouncing object with the same method shown in our Making Stuff Fly tutorial. Use a support (wire, clay, etc) to raise the bouncing object to varying heights for each frame, then place each image over a "blank" frame in an image editor that supports layers (see the bottom of this post for an example). Finally, erase...

Nanci sent us some pictures of the telescope setup she's created with the Widescreen Video Webcam, and a very cool image of Saturn and its rings! Webcam telescope adaptors can be purchased quite inexpensively. To install one on the webcam, you simply unscrew the focus ring assembly and screw the adaptor in its place. She's using the free RegiStax software to process her images. Her telescope setup consists of a Celestron Sky Prodigy 130, and Celestron 2x Barlow lens.

Alexander Unger (or "Guldies," as he goes by) is a stop motion animator and sculptor in Sweden. His primary material of choice is polymer clay, and the whimsical claymation short films that result are both enjoyable and extraordinary. We'll be featuring more selections of his work soon, but first we give you: Magic Water The clay "water" behaves as every familiar stage of H2O, but in curiously fresh forms. Surface tension is exaggerated with the touch of a finger. It is transformed to solid "ice" by a mere twist of the hand. The hard cubes merge just like regular droplets, and...

A standard chessboard is transformed into a hip dancefloor in this stop motion short from Studio Flox.  If you missed the previous post featuring Flox's "beatboxing monsters" you can check that out here. Breakdance Chess Although this German animating team (pictured below) doesn't mind getting complex, they also enjoy pulling off creative concepts with simpler sets like this one. But then, at barely 30 seconds, neither do they belabor the point. Two teams of chess "characters" face each other in a dance-off to showcase their best moves. The choreography plays well with the music cues, flipping, spinning, breakdancing, and even a couple dance between...