Animation News

Animator Nuno Beato shows how he transformed a ProPlus Armature into a beautifully crafted stop motion puppet, complete with moulds and casts.

Creating your own stop motion armature is a great way to learn puppet construction and movement. This simple guide walks you through designing, making, padding, and assembling a basic armature using easy-to-find materials like aluminium wire, Milliput, and sponge. With practice, you'll gain skills essential for animating characters with stability, flexibility, and expressive poses.

How to go about designing and making a simple Plasticine character. Start with a simple sketch, break the design into basic shapes, and sculpt using plasticine. Add features and details before refining with sculpting tools. Consider adding wire for animation. Share your finished creation!

In the world of stop motion animation, a producer is the driving force behind a project, ensuring that everything runs smoothly from concept to completion. Their role encompasses a mix of creative vision, project management, and financial oversight, making them essential to any successful animated production.

Animation captivates audiences by creating the illusion of motion through "Persistence of Vision". This is the brain’s ability to blend rapid images into continuous movement. From early zoetropes to CGI, animators harness this phenomenon to make still images come to life!

Squash and stretch is a core animation principle that adds emotion, weight, and personality to characters. Though challenging in plasticine stop motion, it enhances storytelling by exaggerating motion and emotion. Through careful resculpting or replacement techniques, animators can apply squash and stretch effectively, creating dynamic, expressive, and visually compelling plasticine animations that captivate audiences.

We're often asked, "what do I need to get started in stop motion animation?" So we have put together this short guide which explains how a lot of what you need, you probably already have!