How To Make DELICIOUS Stop Motion Videos

Hey, what's up guys? How's it going? I hope you and yours are good wherever you are. These are just crazy times that we're living in. We're at home, we're stuck indoors with a lot more time on our hands than usual. So I thought, why not spend that time and share with you guys some rocking ways to create some beautiful stop motion videos. There are so many tricks in photography that are actually super, super easy, like this one right here, which I'll show you how to do in just a sec. Now, if you've followed my work before, you kinda know already that I like to pepper a few stop motion animations in here or there when I can. And I've actually made an entire video on how to create food styling time lapses, which kind of share similarities to stop motion animation. And making that video, along with some previous client work that I just did, it kind of reinvigorated and got me pumped to make full-blown stop motion animations again. Creating stop motion animations kind of brings me back to the old film days where you had to wait a considerable amount of time to see your final image. There's this real big buildup of suspense because you oftentimes don't know what you have until way later, until you get back to the computer and put it all together, and then you're either crushed or you're blown away. I'm sure most of you already know what a stop motion animation is. They've been around forever. It's where you take a series of still images of an inanimate object, and with each picture, you move the object ever so slightly. And when you put all of those still images together inside of Premiere or whatever editing program you're choosing, the object becomes animated. The more images that you take and the smaller the movement between each frame, the more fluid your animation will be. Say, 24 or 30 images and tiny movements per second will give you a really fluid video, but it could be choppy. Choppy is good. It could be 10 or 12 images or small movements per second, and that's fantastic because, well, stop motion. I mean, it's meant to have its own look and feel. It's definitely a technique that you're gonna wanna have in your wheelhouse, in your bag of tricks that you can pull out as a standalone option for your clients when their budgets are low, or maybe if you're simply just looking for that single awesome clip that will cut through the noise and make people pause. You could be creating a video with a bunch of smoothly filmed clips and then, bam, throwing a stop motion just to wake people up, or maybe you create one for you or your client just to make them stand out in that endless sea of the same on Instagram or wherever. You can make these objects spin and move and do crazy stuff. When I'm shooting food, I'm surrounded by props and ingredients, and you can use stop motion to give these objects life, to give them a character of their own, and you can use stop motion to create movements that would otherwise be impossible in video without the use of special effects. Basically, if you have a camera, you can create anything from a complex animation to a simple single-shot recipe stop motion video, and because you're shooting in individual images, you can outperform the resolution of most modern video cameras. I mean, my 5DS here shoots 8,000 pixels wide. That's an incredible amount of resolution when you consider putting that together in a video, and even most modern digital DSLRs shoot well over 4K images, and you can shoot in RAW with all the color correction and fine-tuning abilities that come with it. Plus, with that resolution, you have all the power to punch in and zoom around. Now, if you're gonna dive into creating these, I have a huge tip that's gonna save you a ton of headaches down the road. When shooting stop motions, or it's even the same for time lapses, you might run into something called flickering. It's this slight dimming and brightness with every shot that's causing this flicker effect. To fix this, you're gonna wanna keep your camera's aperture at its widest for the lens that you're using to prevent this change in exposure in your stop motion. This is caused by the aperture not returning to the exact same position with every press of the shutter. At least that's the way it is with Canon and for any other brand where the camera controls the aperture. I haven't had this problem when doing stop motions with my Fuji lenses, I believe because you actually control the aperture with the aperture ring on the lens itself. But the resting aperture for these Canon lenses is wide open, so like f2.8 or 1.2 for this 50 millimeter here. But if you keep your aperture at its widest, you should prevent the flickering in your stop motion. However, that does introduce some other problems because these wide apertures let in a lot of light. I used this 50 millimeter f1.2 lens just once in that Waffle video and because the aperture is so wide, I had to lower the power of my lights down to their minimum and I also had to attach this variable ND filter from PolarPro. It was a good solution at the time but I probably should've used a different lens, something with a higher maximum aperture like this 24 to 70 f2.8 lens, which I did end up using for the majority of the clips. But if you have something like an f4 lens, I think that would be perfect for stop motion animation. And now we have all of this gear that makes moving the camera super, super easy. So not only is the object moving in the frame, it's animated, but the camera is moving as well. I created some awesome camera movements by using some of my Edelkrone gear like the Slider 1 and the Head Plus and the Focus Module. I also got to use my Edelkrone Dolly 1 for the very first time, which was really exciting. It's all controlled by the app on your phone, makes it super easy and it's like a little RC car for your camera. And when I used that in conjunction with the Head 1 and the product turntable, it created this really, really unique shot. I haven't made a specific video yet about this particular piece of Edelkrone goodness, but it is a really cool piece of gear. I did use a bit of simple Photoshop magic to create this shot of the waffles spinning. I used this cocktail pick to twirl the waffles and then use the previous image from the stop motion right before the waffle starts to lift up. I grabbed the background from that and using a layer mask, composited out the pick and my hand in each image. Then in Premiere, I repeated the clip so the waffle could spin a few times more. Speaking about editing, I do all of my color correction, my sizing, my cropping and stuff like that in Capture One or Lightroom, whichever program I'm tethering to. Then just like in the last video about creating GIFs, I jump into Photoshop, file, scripts, load layers into stack, select the folder with my images and click OK. Now once my layers have loaded over here in the layer panel, I highlight all of them, go to Windows, timeline, create frame animation and then click over here to select make frames from layers. And then because they always come out in the opposite order for some reason, I'm not sure why that is, maybe you guys do. If you do, leave a comment in the section below. But because of that, you have to click here again and select reverse. Now that's done, they're playing in the proper order. So over here, select to change it from repeating forever, like we did with the GIF, to just once and then click on the video timeline button right here. And everything should be good to go. Hit render, save the video wherever, choose the size that matches your image size. I already sized my images to match my 4K timeline in Premiere, but if you wanna do some key framing, punching in and zooming in and out, you might wanna keep them at whatever size that your camera shot them at. Once you decide on that though however, click okay to render and you have your stop motion video clip out of your images. You can slide on over to Premiere and import that clip. It plays just like any other video clip and you can size it, speed it up, slow it down and key frame it from there. Like this clip we just did in Photoshop, I added a key frame at the beginning and the end to create this zoom in effect while it's spinning. It's actually such a simple and easy editing process. Creating the video, especially ones like this waffle video, take the most amount of time. But it's a fun little add. Funny thing is, is I just saw Ego drop a stop motion ad recently, so I know clients are looking for these. However, if you're just knocking out a hands and hands video for yourself or for a client, if you do it the traditional way, it can become rather repetitive. Now the second way that you can approach this is to give these food and props just a little bit more character. All right, so to continue on, number two is how you guys can create simple stop motion animations for your food and beverage photography. I've always found stop motion animation to be pretty interesting. I didn't really think about it then, but when I go to style a food photograph, I take a photo with every movement of a prop or a piece of food on the table. That way, I kind of have a record of the entire shoot and I always can build my composition. I'll move a prop, I'll take a photo, maybe move it back slightly, take another photo, check and compare the both photos together, just to make sure that the last photo I'm very, very happy with. But I didn't really realize it until later on that I was actually creating these little stop motion animations when I put together all of the outtakes from an entire shoot. So instead of just using the outtakes with a little pre-planning, you can do it intentionally and while at the same time is making that really beautiful final image, you can squeeze some more juice out of that delicious content that you're already making. So with the stop motion animation, what's really cool is as you bring the food and props into the composition with every movement, you take a photo and as the stop motion progresses, the food and props come to life. I'm not being too particular about the movement of my props. I wanna give them character but I'm mainly focused on the distance that each one of them moves between each photograph. That way, one doesn't just go racing across the table. I find it really, really helpful when you're first starting out to create a concrete plan about the overall movement of your props. That way, if you have point A and you have point B, you can get creative and give them character in between. Pretty much whatever you do, the results are gonna be crazy cool and I just find the whole process to be a great time in the studio. And as far as creating tired old hands and pans videos, stop motion recipe videos blow them away if not for the simple fact that they're eye-catching and different. Now, I wouldn't be able to do a video on how you can create stop motion animations without sharing with you one of my favorite stop motion effects. I think of it as the Mary Poppins effect. It's that spoonful of sugar scene where they're singing and cleaning up their room and snapping their fingers and the toys are flying into the shelves. Everything's going crazy. It's a mix of live action and stop motion animations and reverse video all in one and it's a really, really cool effect and it's really simple to pull off. Like in these two shots here in this video, you simply have to plan out where in the frame the stop motion will be and where in the frame the live action will be and make sure those two things don't overlap. And if you really plan it out, you can interact with the stop motion as well like I did here by picking up the cup of coffee. Most of this has to do with editing. You have your two clips. One is the stop motion without the person and the other one has the live action. Now, the separation is the edge of the table and when I was shooting, I wanted to be really careful not to one, bump the camera in any way because if I move the camera at all, those two clips won't line up and two, I didn't wanna flail my arms about or move them across the table in a way that might block any of the items that would later on be in a stop motion. Now, the editing is pretty simple. I lay one clip on top of the other. I might need to speed up or slow down the stop motion to match the length of the live action clip but once I do that, then I'll click on the top clip, head to my editing panel, click on the opacity mask and start using the pen tool to create a mask around the area that I want the stop motion to show through. So, I can click around the edge of the table here and down and I can zoom out and click all the way around the frame to where it links up and the stop motion appears. Now, I can fit to frame and play it a bit to make sure that none of the live action is being cut off by the mask. I can then zoom in again and affect the softness of the mask to really blend the two clips together. It's just that simple. You have a rocking clip. I mean, these are really simple examples but you can get really creative with this and even interact with the stop motion Like picking up that coffee cup in that other clip, I just made sure that the coffee cup landed at the end of the stop motion in a place where I could pick it up and I didn't move it between the end of the stop motion and the filming of the live action. However, the trick is that you only really have one shot at it because once you pick it up, it's really hard to go back if you make a mistake. Real quick, in the last video, I asked you guys to create some nice little tasty GIFs. Post them on Instagram, tag me in it. I would pick my favorite and give you a shout out. Plus, I'd send you one of these really cool lens gears that you see attached to the end of my lens here from followfocusgears.com Well, a lot of you guys submitted your work. A lot of amazing stuff there. I was blown away by it and I picked my favorite which comes from at elliefrigin underscore. So go check her work out. She has some amazing images on her feed. Thank you to all who submitted and at elliefrigin underscore, please DM me with your details and I'll get this lens gear over to you. But that is three ways to make some amazing stop motion animations. Start offering them up to your clients. They're eye-catching, they're fun to make and even though they've been around since the dawn of time, they're kind of forgotten about. So bring them back and get creative. As always, if you like this content, hit that subscribe button, turn on notifications, all that fun stuff and I'll see you in the next one.