5 Stop Motion Mistakes and How To Avoid It

1. Animation Flicker

A lot of stop motion films suffer from flicker issues. If you are experiencing these two things:

Is the camera auto exposure turn on? It is the most flicker culprit. Auto exposure automatically brightens the camera image if the environment becomes dark when every time your hand moves in front of a camera. There are 5 Stop Motion Mistakes. When the Camera tries to compensate by making the image brighter, you see the camera tries to compensate by making the image brighter, and you see the flicker in the frames when they are played back. Turning the Auto exposure off and fixes the problem.

Check that the lights behind you? Sometimes your shadow which can be almost invisible in a bright room becomes very visible when you are taking many pictures of it, and playing the pictures back at 15 FPS. Make sure the only lights in the chamber are the lights shining directly on the set.

2. Camera Shake

When you are animating a film with toy characters, you want the camera to be as still as possible or move gracefully as the camera does in a feature film.

The thing that never looks good is a camera image that is constantly wobbling off-kilter, as the animator bumps it with their sleeve. The best ways to avoid these types of problem is to fasten the camera down with tape or apply rubber bands, strategically.

Some animations made with the larger figures, animation get away with the camera shake because an action is happening all over the room. But as a general rule, if you are making shorts with minifigs and action figures, you want the camera to stay still.

3. Low Frame Rate

A lot of animators post movies they made with still using the camera. They take a lot of pictures with the camera, then use a program like Windows movie makes to import the images, play them back and add sound in it.

The problem with this approach is that Movie Maker limits the speed at which these images are played back. As of the fastest frame rate Movie Maker allows eight frames per second. There are 5 Stop Motion Mistakes.

The easiest solution to this problem is to use a frame-grabbing application, which lets you set the frame rate to faster speeds. Pro animators work in the 12-24 frames per second range. There are 5 Stop Motion Mistakes.

4. Poor Camera Angles

Many of the amateurish films improved immediately if the camera was closer to the action. It doesn’t matter how great your camera is if it looks like the action is happening in the two city blocks away.

In the filmmaking, the animators always used a variety of shots to tell the perfect story in the right direction or angles.

5. Blurry Images

Some of the cameras have a fixed focus and cannot focus on the main objects closer than the 8-12 inches. These cameras not to be used for stop motion since you are typically animating something that’s 3-7 inches away from the lens.

Alternatively, some cameras have automatic focus. These cannot be used because the camera repeatedly loses focus every time your hand moves into the image.

Use cameras that can focus on the objects that are close to the lens have a manual focus ring and are prepared to adjust focus often.

Kshitij Vivaan offers career courses in Animation, VFX, graphics, web designing & gaming for students from different cities such as Sirohi and Sikar. KSHITIJ VIVAN helps these students get the best job placements according to their skills and talents to get the best start to their Professional Careers.