Harder Than It Looks: How to Make a Great Stop Motion Animation

Ever find yourself watching a great little stop motion animation and thinking, “Hey, I could do that?”  What’s that? You made one with some friends in middle school? Great! Maybe you should bang one out tomorrow morning, slap it up on YouTube, and brace yourself for the onslaught of public adoration that’s so damnably difficult to avoid when one’s creation becomes a viral sensation overnight.

Hold your horses, Gumby. Filmmaking has grown increasingly democratic in the digital age, but a really elaborate stop motion animation is still a ton of work. Care to consider all that goes into one?

Try 382 Moleskine notebooks; days of painstaking, no doubt boring, labor; a camera dolly, a green screen, and a live, albeit less-than-professional, cat and mouse team. These are the primary elements of Dutch “graphic motion designer” Rogier Wieland‘s “A Year in Full Colour,” a cunning salute to old-school daily planners. Unsurprisingly, this flight of fancy was commissioned by Moleskine, a brand whose inroads into the iPad cover market would likely not be enough to keep things in the black should jotting things on paper go the way of the dodo.  Perhaps instead of making a stop motion of your own, you could pour your creative efforts into recording your upcoming appointments in a Moleskine classic.

As to which you should view first—the finished product (above) or the equally brief, but highly illuminating Making Of  (below)–we leave that in your capable hands.

Related Content

Spike Jonze Presents a Stop Motion Film for Book Lovers

Going West: A Stop Motion Novel

Ayun Halliday‘s planner of choice is the Slingshot Organizer  Follow her @AyunHalliday


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