Animation Helper

"...There is no CGI wizardry here; the stop-motion techniques employed by Lord, Park, and their team have changed relatively little since the days of the original King Kong. Each of the 110,000 frames of film that comprise the movie has to be treated as an individual shot. After each frame is photographed, the animators make minor movements, change facial expressions, and so on before shooting the next frame and repeating the process all over again. Using these techniques, the Aardman team has been able to create fluid, realistic movement that gives the characters a natural, lifelike feel..."

http://www.dvdverdict.com/

Its obvious Chicken Run was done using much professional/expensive equipments and more skilled people.

When talking about professional tools you should read this article.

Common used techniques:

Bringing "dead" objects to life (Sorry, not dead people ;-)
Instead of moving camera you move the objects and you get an approximate motion. For this you need a manual capture, onion-skin feature and finally re-encoding of the still frames into a movie file (e.g. AVI).

Speeding up low-motion objects (flower rising, sun rising, street traffic, etc.)
You let objects moving and you shoot every N seconds. For example for shooting cloudscapes in fast motion use 1 frame every 5 second and play it back at 15-30 fps.

 

Oops! I almost forget... Why explaining this?!

Because I enjoy doing still animation and now I can do it now using my own software ;-)
Here I have some samples done with the new version of Video2Photo. Where done in hurry because I was busy with the software development.

What is missing to the software now is:

• onion-skin feature to present the previous frame for easy positioning of the objects
• jpeg2avi conversion - Done! (Download the latest installation package)
• timed capture

I think I will get it running in some weeks, so come back soon...