Stopmotion Explosion Blog

These claymation beat-boxing monsters are a killer combo from German animating team Studio Flox that will inspire you to create your own unique rhythms and characters. The Monsters - Clap your hands! Florian, Nica, and Maximilian work together in Stuttgart, Germany, making handcrafted promotional and instructional videos for businesses and organizations. This one, though, was a personal project, using sculpted characters created by friends and guests at one of their summer parties! When looking for characters to animate, we usually gravitate toward those with a larger range of motion, but here the limited movement is put to good use. You could...

What exactly is a GIF? It stands for Graphics Integrated File, and you've probably seen a bunch of them. Widely used for web design and animating business logos and banners, GIFs are also popular on social media for sharing short clips of moving images. That makes it perfect for creating viral bites of stop motion magic! Consider this clip by Ian Padgham. It auto-plays a sequence of frames, and on the surface appears to be a GIF, but it's actually a video file put on constant loop. A true GIF will store as an image file with no associated sound, taking up less space and loading...

Popular Youtuber Brusspup specializes in science-inspired optical illusions. Here he fires up his stop motion engine for a simple choreography pixelated by 320 tealight candles. The results are mesmerizing. Amazing Fire Animation - Brusspup You've likely seen this sort of pixelated effect before with Lego or other unit-based objects (possibly even tried it yourself!). In fact, Brusspup isn't the first to use the idea of animating candlelight, either. There are several candle animations out there, but most of them turned off the room lights and shut out daylight to increase the contrast of fire to the darkness. While it does look neat to have the bold glow in contrast to...

"Internetainment" celebs Rhett & Link are known for their comedic sketches, quirky music videos, and epic exploration of randomness. Here they teamed up with fellow Youtubers Joe Penna and Billy Reid to create a stop-motion T-shirt battle—and it's a blast to watch. (Literally) T-SHIRT WAR! - Rhett & Link Teamwork sparkles in the creative collaboration for this brilliant animated piece. Verbal sound effects compound the comedy. Rhett & Link personalities paired with hundreds of custom-ordered T-shirts construct a tale of friendly pranks that escalate from popping balloons, to egg-smashing, to setting someone on fire! Despite the hazards, friendship (and foolishness) wins out in the end. Months of planning went into the...

Time-lapse videos are fun to watch. Combine time lapse with stop motion, and you have something magical! Chris Herridge “accidentally” started making the animation below when he began documenting his rebuild of an old truck engine with his DSLR camera—which he admits ended up covered in engine oil. Although this video is his sole upload to Youtube, he now has millions of views and over 2500 subscribers! Once Chris decided to create the animation of his process, he dropped back to better design his approach. Using storyboards to visualize all the angles he would need, he then continued taking pictures of his...