Making a Stop-Motion Animation

Creating this stop-motion was much more work than I had originally anticipated. It totaled about 40-50 hours of animation time, and another 10 of scanning, plus miscellaneous time spent rending and recording music. Overall, I feel it was very rewarding, as I really wanted to produce something that felt authentic, in every way I could make it.

Phenome is the story of the life of a small circle. It was completed entirely through Hand Animation. All of the frames were drawn by hand, with pencil on paper, and then layered with an acrylic-stained acetate transparency to provide the background coloration. The short minute-and-a-half piece totals near 1000 frames total.

The audio is an original recording, taken from an improvised session between Kevin Folk (on bottles), Ryan Goh (on Piano), and Korey Carter (on percussion).

Below is a single frame from the animation, as well as several Master Frames (pieces of paper I used as constant references for size, placement, speed, and movement of the various figures as I animated each frame.)