Stop Motion Studio

How does the exhibit work?

Choose one of three landscapes. Create a scene with the puppets in front of the camera. Press the camera symbol on the screen. The first picture is taken.

You can now move the dolls a little bit and take a new picture. You can take as many pictures as you like. The computer will put all the photos together. This is how a stop-motion film is made.

At the end, you can choose to play the movie as a loop or as a boomerang. You can also choose the speed. Then you can scan the QR code to watch the clip on your mobile phone. Click on download first, though.

What is the science behind it?

We continue with the granddaddy of technologies: stop-motion. Stop-motion is a film technique almost as old as filmmaking itself. You take a picture, move the object very slightly and take a picture again. You keep doing this.

When you put images in quick succession,then it seems as if the object moves by itself. That's because your brain makes the images flow together into a smooth motion. All the moving images you see on a screen are made like this.

To get a nice smooth motion, filmmakers often use 24 frames per second. If you use less, the image is sometimes a bit jerkier. But you also have faster results. Then you'll have more time to explore the other technologies. You're welcome!

Stop-motion with clay

Do you know 'Chicken Run'? This popular film starring chickens was made with mouldable clay figures. This form of stop-motion is called claymation or clay animation. For every sound a chicken makes, a different beak was put on the figure.

The children's series 'Shaun the sheep', about a clever sheep who has all kinds of adventures on the farm, is also claymation.

Stop-motion or not?

The makers of 'The Lego Movie' wanted the film to look homemade. Basically as if a child had put the film together himself. That's why they made it look like it was stop-motion. But actually it was just made by computer.

Why didn't the makers actually use stop-motion? Because that would have taken them a very long time. They did make the credits in classic stop-motion style and that 3-minute-long piece took 3 animators 2 months of full-time work.