iKITMovie Blog

In these recessionary times it’s good to know you can still get good results on a shoestring when it comes to building your own set for your stop motion movie. All you need is a few desktop lamps and a cardboard box! That’s it! Below you can see a simple setup used by my nephew James for his contribution to our stop motion movie gallery. A simple box lined in this case with black paper.

Simple Stop Motion Set

The backdrop James used is a photo of a digger in a quarry which suited his animation down to the ground. No need for Chromakey really with stop motion animation at this level. It complicates things unnecessarily and takes the emphasis away from the stop motion animation itself.

The reason for the cardboard box is to build up the sides around your character to avoid any shadows and reduce the influence of unwanted light such as windows and so forth. This is really important as each snapshot should have the same amount of light as the next. Otherwise you will get a flickering effect when the animation is played back. Thus spoiling the movie. Also the box is very useful for attaching your backdrop painting/ drawing or photo.

As for your lighting you can cut a hole and cover it with greaseproof paper with you lamp shining through. This softens the light in order to avoid hard shadows. Closing the blinds on your windows during the day is normally not enough to ensure a constant lightstream. As the sun goes behind a cloud you may not notice the difference in your set but it will be there on the photo.

Sunlight will vary from frame to frame

So make the small effort to visit your local store and get some boxes and good luck animating.

Diarmuid -

Tags: set, stop motion

This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Stop Motion Tutorials and Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.