Stop Frame Animation

Here are some of the stop frame animation films made in the Spotty Dog Animation Studio in Brighton (ie. my office!)

The films below were all made in my office in Brighton.

The children's stop frame animation films

Here are some of the children's stop frame animation films. This process takes focus, patience and concentration - something the students below all had in spades.

'Zomlin Maniacs' was made by Max20, an eight year old boy who was having holiday lessons with me focussing on reading and writing. In the middle of the summer holidays we made this film as a break from the study. Max had worked on the background drawings at home.

'Snuggle Bugs Restaurant' was made by Estey, an adult learner, who has been coming to Spotty Dog Tutoring for about 5 months. She arrived with furniture from a doll's house, characters, backdrop and the screenplay! All we had to do was the filming, voice overs and find the sound effects :-)

'Don't Stop Me Now' is a film by 'J25', a 7 year old boy, 8 in a few weeks. He had very clear ideas about what he wanted but the biggest challenge was getting his lego model to fly. We managed to tie some cotton to it which in some frames you can see and in others you can't. Since the music is under copyright there are ads on the movie which you can click to remove.

Pops24 is the pseudonym for an 8 year old girl who wanted to do a film involving the famous 'Maths Frogs': Tensie, Onesie, Honey Hundred, Thelma Thousand and Super Simon. She made the mouse with plasticine and brought in furniture from her dolls house.

The Hudson Brothers (8 and 10 years old) brought in their lego models for this film. It was quite an ambitious undertaking and we had to clear the desk and balance one of the cameras on a chair and a dictionary to get everything in the frame!

Cal1234 (9 years old) wanted to use the red noses from Red Nose Day 2015. We enjoyed using the audio snippets from Zu3d (see below) which added a more realistic space feel to the film. We attached his toy tractor (the rocket) to a felt tip rather than have his hand in the frame.

Fin123 (age 7) was the first child to make a film in the Spotty Dog studio. He brought along a box of lego and small toys and chose the tractor, a teddy, a monkey and a dinosaur to animate. We used gaffa tape to attach the teddy to the tractor and had fun doing the screams and roars!

Zu3d Animation Kit

The stop frame animation software I use is by Zu3d (see below). I find it a very powerful bit of kit and the package below comes with a webcam, the animation software, starter pack of plasticine and some green screen material. It is very intuitive and has many sophisticated features such as painting tools, magic rubber and rig removal tool. The other brilliant feature is the audio bank that includes special effects such as engine noises and animal sounds, as well as a large bank of music that can be easily imported and used with the film.

Zu3D Animation Kit for Windows PCs and Apple Mac OS X: complete stop motion animation kit

Created and written by Hilary Burt.