Paper stop motion animation - I love you

I made my first stop-motion animation last week and had an absolute ball – it was such a fun process! I’m officially hooked, and my goal is to be able to make a good quality five-minute claymation for my son’s second birthday in May next year.

I’m starting with simple 2D animations to get a handle on the basics.

This time, I decided to work with paper. Luckily, we hoard anything that’s vaguely useful, and I found some coloured paper tucked away in my office.

This animation was made by going backwards. I started with the final photo, and slowly cut away pieces starting with the flower (this tutorial shows you how to make your paper flowers bloom). Then I cut up the letters, one cut for each letter per photo. Finally, I slowly moved the pieces of cut paper out of the frame.

Taking the photos was time-consuming, maybe 90 minutes, and editing took about 30 minutes in Stop Motion Studio (which I bought for $14.99 on iTunes, but pretty much any editing software should work if you can figure out how to use it).

In my rush to get started, I forgot to change the aspect ratio on my camera to 16:9, so the letters are cut off slightly.

The final result

I surprised my husband with it because he’s an excellent human being and took our son out so I could take photos uninterrupted.

And a gif!

I found out you can make gifs in Stop Motion Studio. This is very exciting for me. I am going to make soooo many gifs.

I'll keep making these stop motion animations and sharing what I learn as I go.