Special Effects:
Water, Fire, Flying/Jumping/Throwing
Written by Mike Brent
I thought these subjects in particular need to be grouped together because
they get a lot of attention from newbies... usually before they have even
animated a simple walk! A good rule of thumb - learn to walk before you try
to run or fly. You need to get a grasp on the basics before you tackle special
effects. Keep in mind these are advanced effects, and there is no single way
to do any of them - no right or wrong way.
Often people will just ask "How do you make puppets fly?" or "How do you animate
water?". The very fact that anyone would ask such a broad, vague question
reveals that they aren't prepared to attempt it, because effects like these
are different depending on many factors. I'll start with water.
ANIMATING WATER
Stopmotion is problem-solving. It requires that you think your way through
a series of problems and find solutions that will work for you in your particular
case. These solutions will be different from animator to animator and even
for the same animator in different films or scenes. Each scene has its own
requirements.
First of all, you need to decide what kind of water you want to animate. The
approach would be entirely different for a teardrop than for an ocean, or
a river or a stream from a garden hose. You also need to decide what kind
of animation you're doing. Is it realisitc, required to match live action
footage, or is it highly stylized puppetfilm? Corpse-Bride like finnesse and
attention to detail, or a loose claymation style?
Once you've answered these questions, it's time to begin your research. There
has been some discussion of methods for animating water on the message board,
and as always your diligence and skill at seeking out nuggets of information
is one of the keys to success. Don't be surprized if your questions on the
board get little or no response, or if you're told to do your research....
what you're asking is intricate and complicated, and no-one can figure it
out for you. Instead, think of it as a litmus test.... a guage of your problem-solving
skills and your cleverness. So the question becomes... "How will you
animate water?"
As time goes by, hopefully we'll get ahold of some information and links to
add to this section, but for now this one link is all I have to post here:
How
U Animate Water
Think of it as a starting point from which to launch your own creative thinking
process.
Here are some links Nick and I unearthed from the General Special Effects
forum. As you can easily see from looking at the questions, it's been a recurring
theme for newbies to post these questions without bothering to check the forums
for whatever informartion is already there. It only took us a few minutes
to assemble this list, and anyone who is serious about embarking on the journey
of learning stopmotion should be able to do the same. But for those with LMCF®
disease (Lazy Mouse-Clicking Finger) here is a nice listing, assembled for
your reading enjoyment:
Water
Liquid
in Stop Motion
Ocean???
Animated
Water
Rain
in Stop Motion?
How
to make flowing water?
Rain?
How
do you animate water?
ANIMATING FIRE
The same can be said about fire as water.... once again, a lot of different
approaches, some of which have been discussed on the board, many of which
have not. If you're serious in your inquiry, you've probably already found
the discussions or will soon. I'll try to locate them and post links here
in time. For now this is a place-holder.
Animating
fire
Candle
flame
A
way of doing pyrotechnics and gunfire
Here's a hybrid question, combining both fire and water (two
of the four elements of the ancient world.... just add air and earth and you've
got all of creation itself!)
Fire
and Water
FLYING/JUMPING/THROWING
There are several ways to animate objects seeming to move through the air
with no visible means of support. One way is to use a flying rig with very
thin threads that can't be seen, with lighting carefully set up to keep them
invisible. This was once the preferred method, before the days when the computer
added supercharged effects to every desktop animator's arsenal. The tricky
part is to keep those wires from being seen. I've even heard that Harryhausen
would sometimes go so far as to paint directly onto the wires frame by frame
to make them match the background colors! You might not want to go to that
extreme, but at least be aware that you can use background elements to help
hide wires/threads... dark bands, complex patterns, anything that will help
to camoflage them. On the other hand, if you have access to a program like
Photoshop or better yet After Effects, or any program that allows frame by
frame image manipulation, then you can use a method like the one described
in my tutorial at StopMoShorts, listed below.
Erasing
a Jumping Rig
FLYING LINKS:
Flying
Effect
Sorry all of this is so sketchy right now, but it will be growing over time,
and it seemed necessary to get something posted right away, what with all
the recent newbie questions on these particular subjects.