10 Simple steps for creating stop motion animation

Stop motion animation is something available to everyone from kids with iPhones to professional animators. This is what makes it so interesting! If you can imagine it, you can make it.

The premise is simple: Take a picture of an inanimate object, move the object a bit or write a tiny piece of a letter, take another picture, and repeat. Then compile all of your pictures into a video using a tool like iMovie or Adobe Premiere Pro. I’m going to share how I made my favorite stop motion animation to date, which is inspired by all of the beautiful colors in the produce section of the grocery store.

I’ll cover just the basics. You can really do as much or as little as you want to get to perfect. In fact, after I made my first stop motion, my thirteen-year-old daughter made a fantastic stop motion animation about making s’mores using nothing but a very old iPhone and iMovie. The process is fun and you will be pretty amazed with the product, even if it’s not perfect the first time.

Eat the Rainbow from Erica Everhart on Vimeo.

10 Steps to creating stop motion animation

1. Create a plan.

It’s super important to plan out your stop motion video before you start. It’s also important to allow yourself the knowledge that no matter how much you plan, you will be changing that plan as you go. I typically spend a while (sometimes a long while) contemplating an idea. I sleep on it, I think about it while driving, I let my mind do its thing. From there, I like to make a general storyboard so that I have an idea of how many frames I want to shoot and what sorts of items I need to be gathering or making.

2. Calculate the number of frames you’ll need.

Typically you are aiming for 10 to 15 frames per second of video. The fewer frames per second the jerkier your stop motion will look, which can create a fun, funky look, if that’s what you’re going for. In normal video we’re used to seeing about 24 frames per second. For stop motion video, I tend to do around 12 frames per second.

Instagram allows videos up to one minute in length, but a one-minute stop motion animation would take me a really long time to make. I tend to aim for 30 seconds or so. At 12 frames per second, that means I’m shooting (and editing) 360 images. I break my storyboard into scenes and apportion an approximate number of frames to each scene.

3. Think about transitions.

Transitions are important to move us from one scene to the next. It is important to think about your transitions at the outset because sometimes transitions can affect the order you shoot a scene. For example, if you are going to ball up a piece of paper and then unfurl it to reveal a new scene, you need to make sure you’re shooting the flat paper to balled up paper sections in the correct order. (Once you ball up a piece of paper, you’re never flattening it out again.) You can always reverse the order of images in post production.

Transitions require a lot of creativity to look appealing. I sometimes struggle with transitions, so I like to watch lots of stop motion animation videos to get ideas. Transitions definitely add a huge degree of professionalism to your videos.

4. Find the right aspect ratio and backdrop.

Are you shooting for Instagram? Then your video is best done as a square (you can also post videos in other orientations on Instagram). Vimeo is fine with any aspect ratio. Are you going to shoot on a white background? Black background? Awesome wood table? Find your canvas and then make some marks for yourself so that you give yourself a bounding box within which you will keep your entire scene. I tape down dowels of equal length in a square because I am usually shooting for optimal sharing on Instagram.

5. Create your props.

I generally work on one scene at a time in case something from one scene makes me want to change course. I will create or gather any props necessary for my shoot one scene at a time. In the example video that involves fruits and vegetables, I cut up one color of food at a time, shot that color, then moved on to the next color.

I also like to create paper props, which sometimes involves drawing, coloring, and then cutting. Sometimes I get to use my awesome Silhouette precision cutter to cut out shapes, eyeballs, letters, etc. In the photo of my cute little lemon, I used my Silhouette to cut out the pieces of the eyeballs and glue dots to hold everything together. I had to make many different eyeballs so that the lemon could properly “emote.”

6. Find or create even lighting.

At this point it is time to set up to shoot. My first consideration is lighting. Small variations in light can result in flickering, so you really want to make sure you have a solid light source. A window next to a table can work, but I would strongly consider using a reflector on the side opposite the window to even out your lighting. I do a lot of product photography so I have an awesome continuous lighting setup that works great for stop motion. Simple LED panel lights also work great.

7. Set everything up.

I shoot most of my stop motion from overhead, like a flat lay. Sometimes I will also shoot looking dead on for a 3D object (like the lemons in my example video). I prefer to shoot on white, but I’ve done other backgrounds too. I begin by setting up some white seamless paper so that it swoops onto the floor (or a very low table). If I will be shooting only flat lay, I sometimes just use a large piece of foam core board.

Next, I set up my tripod so that it is looking straight down on my canvas, which I’ve figured out in step 4, above. My tripod has a telescoping arm so my camera can actually be looking straight down on the scene. Don’t worry, this isn’t necessary, but if you do use a telescoping arm, make sure you weight your tripod down so that your camera doesn’t tip over and hit the ground.

Last, I like to take a shot with a gray card once I get the exposure perfect. The gray card helps with easy color correction later on. I always shoot with a remote shutter release so that I’m not slightly bumping the camera between shots.

8. Shoot your scenes as still frames.

When I’m ready to get started with shooting, I’ll begin with one scene. I don’t always start with the beginning. In fact, for my first scene I will typically pick the easiest to execute so that I can work out any kinks I encounter without adding complicating factors. I will also usually pull this scene into Lightroom, do a quick edit and then compile it into a video so that I can get a sense for whether I’m happy with 12 frames per second or whether I’d rather shoot higher or lower.

To shoot: Set up your prop, take a shot, move it a tiny bit, take another shot and repeat until you’re done. This is where your math skills come in handy. If you know you need five seconds of this scene, you need 60 shots. If you are making a lemon walk across a stage, for example, you need to move slowly enough that you don’t get there in 10 shots, but not so slow that it takes 120 shots. I do not treat this as a precise science. If my video is 28 seconds or 32 seconds, that is ok. (Unless of course someone is paying me big bucks to make a precisely 30 second video!).

One important note: Make sure you and your shadow are all the way out of the frame before you take a shot. It can be easy to get yourself into a rhythm of shoot, move, shoot, move. But you’ll be a sad stop motion animator when you’re done with a scene and you realize you were casting a shadow in some of your images and your exposure is all wonky.

9. Edit your still frames.

Editing a series of images isn’t as much of a chore as it sounds. With my lighting setup remaining stable, I can edit the first image in Lightroom then sync the settings across all images to create a uniform look. It all sounds so easy but even the best laid plans seem to result in slightly different looks for different scenes. When I view all of the images in grid mode in Lightroom, I can usually recognize these subtle differences and then correct them.

Occasionally I will have to pull a series of images into Photoshop one-by-one and clone something big out, like berry juice from a beautiful white background. That is time-consuming and I highly recommend thinking about correcting any problem while shooting instead of in post processing. The berry juice was unavoidable.

I’ve included a straight out of camera image and the edited image so that you can see how I aimed for a bright white clean background.

10. Compile your still images into a video.

From Lightroom, I export all of my images at full resolution. You can use iMovie or Adobe Premiere Pro to compile your images into a movie. I’m sure there is a Windows based software like iMovie that works well also. I like to use Premiere Pro because it gives me more options than iMovie. With any software, the general idea is to import a series of images and tell the program to play them at a certain frame rate. In iMovie you can do that through the time setting, which is set to 4 seconds by default. You can change this to 0.1 second for 10 frames per second, or you can do more math to figure out the decimal that most closely approximates your chosen frame rate. You also need to turn off the Ken Burns effect in iMovie.

Most commercial stop motion videos include music, which definitely adds to the feel of the film. There are a few sites that you can use for royalty-free music, and many sites where you can buy licenses. I like Bensound and Free Music Archive for my personal work.

I also like to add either a title, an end screen, or both to my films. Once you are happy with it, export your video and share!

Stop motion animation scratches so many itches: You can craft until your heart’s content, you can be incredibly precise and perfect, you can make things on paper that you can only imagine in your wildest mind, you can take photographs, you can edit, you can search for hours for the perfect music to accompany your masterpiece – it has it all. I find that stop motion animation is such a great rut buster and a wonderful excuse to spend more money on craft supplies.

Erica’s stop motion animation gear

Camera: Fujifilm XT-2 mirrorless camera
Lenses: Fujinon XF 10-24mm f/4 (I adore this lens for nearly everything.)
Tripod: Manfrotto 190XP with pistol grip head and a heavy canvas bag to weigh down the tripod so it doesn’t move.
Lighting: Westcott TD6 Spiderlites
Other important tools: Remote shutter release, completely charged battery, Sandisk Extreme Pro memory cards (64GB), gray card, background paper or foam core, craft supplies, Silhouette Cameo
Editing software: Lightroom, Adobe Premiere Pro, and sometimes iMovie

PRO TIP: Use an adapter that allows you to plug your camera into the wall – you really don’t want your camera to move at all once you get set up!

All images by Erica Everhart

Instagram inspo: @rachelryle, @trishazemp, @scrinkl, @creativekipi, @traceloops, @ericaeverhart

Have you created your own stop motion animation? We wanna see! Share in the comments so we can all go follow you on Instagram. 

More posts to help with your stop motion animation videos:

20 Smart and simple flat lay backgrounds for the perfect styled photo

3 Easy DIY photography hacks pros love

How I turned my garage into a beautiful photo studio: a video tour

Storytelling through video fusion: 5 Helpful tips for photographers

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