Create Minimalist Stop Motion with These 3 Tips

People love stop motion because it's quirky, making products appear fun and appealing.

Unfortunately, not every brand has a quirky style. So what should you do if a client wants a stop motion animation that appeals to more "serious" consumers?

The best solution is to create a minimalist stop motion animation. It's not only simple to do, but it also often produces visually stunning results that are stylish and classy.

We'll show you three simple ways to apply minimalist stop motion animation to create a refined look for elegant products.

Slow down a notch

In typical situations, using drastic movements in stop motion allows you to captivate the audience. Unfortunately, that also makes clips look "cartoony."

The secret to creating an elegant animation is to slow everything down--to the point that your audience could barely notice the movements at all!

When you slow everything down, it almost makes people think they're looking at a photo--except for the few subtle movements you added to the mix.

Use realistic movements

Sometimes, capturing motion as realistically as possible (instead of animating whimsical movements) also creates a less cartoony vibe.

When capturing realistic movements, we often want everything to move slower and less jittery. To do that, we unplug our camera from Dragonframe and take burst shots!

We would ask our model to move like they usually would and press down our camera button to capture every movement they make.

So why not record a video then instead of taking a series of pictures? Doing a series of shots instead of shooting a video is the easiest way to create that classic stop motion look.

Create light magic

The most subtle way to introduce movement to your animation is by moving the light across the frame. You heard that right! Instead of moving your product, you move the light instead!

Of course, you can't just randomly change your light source's position. So you need to be strategic with it and treat it as an element you need to animate.

If you want to create the illusion of time passing, you can move your light from left to right. Why? Because the sun usually moves from East to West.

But of course, you can always mix it up and go from right to left as well. Or even up and down and diagonally (just like what we did in our sample GIF). That way, you give people a bit more surprise, especially since they're used to scanning images from left to right.

But no matter what you end up doing, make sure you move the light in small increments. That way, you don't end up with an animation that looks like fast cars are passing by your set.

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Of course, you can always add whimsical elements in minimalistic stop motion. But it would be best if you always kept the movements subtle. That way, you don't end up sidelining the very product you're selling.

So remember to go slow and make everything as realistic as possible. Those are the two ingredients that will add elegance to the products you're animating.