Stop Motion Animation in After Effects

Joey Korenman : Oh my God. Gosh, Joey here at school of motion and welcome to the last day of 30 days of after effects. I want to give a quick shout out to the department of motion design at the Ringling college of art and design for sponsoring this series. They were an amazing partner to work with throughout this whole process. And I really want to thank them. If you haven't already check out the link in the resource tab where you can get more information about them. This last video is pretty cool. What we're going to talk about is how you can integrate stop motion into your after effects work. I'm going to go over some tricks that will let you sort of set up a template that you can create really neat, stop motion elements with. And we're also going to talk about some compositing tricks that go along with it.
Joey Korenman : This is going to be kind of a unique one, and I hope that it's going to be something you want to go out and try and eventually start building your own elements and playing around with it. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account so you can grab the project files from this lesson as well as assets from any other lesson on the site. Now once more into after effects. So today, uh, what I want to show you guys is some interesting ways you can incorporate stop motion into your after effects toolbox. So, um, you know, doing stop motion, there's a million ways you can do it. And so I thought what an interesting example might be is to show you how to do like a paper crumpling transition. Now I've done this before without using stop motion software, because it's really not that hard.
Joey Korenman : Um, you know, really what, what, what you do is you just start with a piece of paper that's folded flat, and you just frame by frame slowly, crumble it up and take a picture until it gets to a small little ball. Okay. Now it's much, much easier to do if you use stop motion software. So I'll show you guys, uh Dragonframe if you're unfamiliar with Dragonframe, it is one of the most fun programs I've ever used in my entire life, and you pretty much can hook up any DSLR camera to it, and it can control the camera and take a picture and it can do a lot of things. And I don't want to really spend too much time in Dragonframe on this tutorial, but I used Dragonframe to shoot this piece of paper. I pointed my camera straight down on the desk. I had a ring light on it, and you can see the last frame looks a little bit blue.
Joey Korenman : You don't have to worry about that. The way dragon frameworks is genius. It, um, it takes full Rez pictures with your camera. So my T3, I takes like, I don't know what the mega pixel is, but they're like 5k images, but it saves a low Rez version of that image that it can play back really quickly, literally in real time. So you can very quickly preview what your animation is looking like. And so it took me about 10 minutes to do this, and I was very happy with it. And even at the end, I did, you know, I sort of, I mean, I'll kind of go frame by frame and show you here's the first frame. And then I crumpled up the edges and I taped the paper to the desks, so it would move and I just kept crumpling it. And then when I got to the end, I just moved it a little bit just to get a little extra motion at the finish.
Joey Korenman : Okay. So there you go. That's that's Dragonframe and then you can export out your image sequence and, and export it however you want. So I exported it out and here it is, this is my image sequence. Now I imported it into after effects and I made sure, and we talked about this in the last video to interpret the footage correctly. Now this is stop motion. So I wanted it to go at 12 frames a second, not 24. Now you can do it at whatever you want, but to get that stop motion, feel it's better to do it at 12. It just sort of that's it just sort of is the look that's the aesthetic. So 12 frames a second. And so now if I take this and I drop it into a comp, it's going to make a gigantic comp, right? So the, this is actually the pixel size of these images.