This charming stop motion from 2013 tells the story of the origin of Thanksgiving. It’s courtesy of the students of Springdale Public Schools in Arkansas as a Happy Thanksgiving PSA for Springfield District Television.

With creative props and sets, good storytelling and simple, yet effective animation this video shows us that you don’t have to be perfect to create good work.

The students behind this production learned valuable lessons about lighting, camera placement and continuity as part of the heuristic learning process every animator must experience and still produced a meaningful, memorable piece and a nice message, particularly for those of us in the United States during the Thanksgiving holiday.

Uploaded to YouTube by Springdale Public Schools.

Uploaded to YouTube by Carpe Donktum.

Claymation Christmas Celebration was a television special that originally aired in the United States in 1987. It was produced and directed by claymation legend Will Vinton, creator of the ubiquitous 90’s California Raisins ads.

Claymation Christmas features Rex and Herb, recurring Vinton dinosaur characters who introduce and discuss a series of Christmas tunes.

This “Carol of the Bells” sequence portrays a performance at Notre Dame Cathedral under the direction of Maestro Quasimodo by The Paris Bell-Harmonic, a group of church bells who strike their own heads with mallets to achieve their respective notes, with one bell constantly dawdling and enraging Quasimodo.

Uploaded to YouTube by Monitogo Studios.

Monitogo Studios recently succeeded in raising over $5000 on a Kickstarter campaign to fund their second brickfilm, Atlas. This comes after their initial success with Bound, released in 2015. Bound clocked in at 50 minutes and was shot over an almost-six-year period at twelve frames per second with 43 characters and over 60 extensive sets. Atlas, currently in production, is just as ambitious if not even more so. In this first video, you can see the level of attention that is going into each shot.

Director, writer and animator Greg Tull describes Atlas as “a stunning stop motion brickfilm about sacrifice and the power of love.” The film centers on a father, son and uncle who work at a railroad drawbridge control center set in the 1930's. A train is running ahead of schedule and a damaged rail line promises catastrophic results. With inability to contact the train en route, the three must make a critical and costly decision in a desperate move to save it.

According to Monitogo’s website, the artists at the studio strive to “capture the hearts of our audience and inspire them to glorify God through genuine characters, clever stories, and realistic worlds. Our niche specialty, brickfilm, has opened the door for us to use a medium that is little recognized as a serious filmmakers tool.  We hope to redefine that perception of the most loved toy of all time!”

Uploaded to YouTube by Monitogo Studios.

This second video is a wonderful inside look at the animating process at Monitogo.

On Atlas, Tull is collaborating with animators Jack Nop, Spencer Berglund and Benjamin Ely. Nathan Ashton is performing sound design, Micah and Monica Austin are contributing story, post production and visual effects and Rick Holets is composing. Monitogo animates on DZED Systems Dragonframe Stop Motion with post production in Adobe Systems Creative Suite 6 and CC.

Find Monitogo Studios: on YouTube / on Facebook / on Instagram.

Uploaded to Youtube by Purdue University.

It’s plenty cold on StopMotionPlanet so the winter conditions have us thinking it’s not too early to make hot chocolate and spread some holiday cheer.

The staff at Purdue Marketing and Media (and their toys) wished viewers happy holidays in this video shared campus-wide before the 2018-2019 winter recess.

Boiler Up!

With her Paper Parkour series of works, illustrator and graphic designer Serene Teh uses stop motion to celebrate the artistry of parkour.

“Nothing makes me happier than the notion of expanding my imagination to a piece of paper,” says Teh. “Of course I work on various media as well.”

With her parkour animations, Teh says she aims “to capture the movement and physical beauty of the traceur while traversing through the environment.”

See more of Teh’s Paper Parkour here.

Uploaded to YouTube by IAMAG.

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GIF of a portion of the animation at double speed.

Uploaded to YouTube by dinaa amin.

Stop motion artist dina Amin’s distraught glue gun returns in Glue Life no. 2. Amin says her second glue-inspired short was inspired by “my 2019 so far. I've been away for a long time from YouTube, and a lot of places. But I am slowly getting back to animating. This year every time I feel like I've got hold of balancing work, it falls apart again!”

Let's hope her glue gun can keep it all together for this inspirational animator.

Support Amin on Patreon and get access to exclusive things she posts only there. See more on Instagram or dinaaamin.com.

Uploaded to Youtube by Raz Koller.

Raz Koller is a writer, musician and stop motion animator originally from Tel-Aviv, now based in London.

He recently launched a surreal, dreamlike stop motion animation show called Broken Hills on his YouTube channel. It's a story told in six episodes with mini episodes in between along with twelve accompanying songs.

When asked about the theme of Broken Hills, Koller says, “The story is... Well... I don't really want to give away too much but let's just say that the story is perhaps not what it seems to be at first.”

Koller does all of the writing, design, animation, editing, voices and music himself. He works on his free time so it takes months to make a six- to seven-minute episode. He uses Newplast for the puppets and shoots against a green screen. The backgrounds are Photoshop creations and the editing is done with Adobe Premier.

We last posted a work by Dina Amin about a year ago in April of 2018. She recently shared another one of her works with us here at Stop Motion Planet.

“My very first lip-sync animation!

Uploaded to Youtube by dinaa amin.

“I am a product designer from Egypt who discovered her love for stop motion. Since I am a self taught stop motion animator, to teach myself how to lip sync this is what I’ve done:

”I recorded what the characters would say, I wrote it down phonetically to try and figure out what kind of shapes and sounds are there, then after I identified key shapes, I video recorded myself saying the script then traced the key shapes from my phone (just like how the pros do it, i know!) then I scanned these into photoshop and made a mouth set. I then imported my mouth set in Dragonframe and started testing the lip sync. I sculpted the tiny mouths from regular plasticine, made my characters out of regular items I had around and started animating.”

For more with Dina Amin, try these other links:
https://www.instagram.com/dina.a.amin/
https://www.patreon.com/dinaaamin
https://www.dinaaamin.com/

Uploaded to Youtube by dinaa amin.

And here is a making-of video by the animator explaining the process she went through to produce her stop-motion lip-sync animation!

Uploaded by YouTuber Nobody is Watching the Children

Released in 2018, Hi Five the Cactus is billed as "The World's First Stop-Frame Animated Western." Directed and Animated by Chris Thomas, Hi Five is inspired by a song written by a former folk band in Philly called the Extraordinaires. Thomas expanded the story of the song into a five-act stop-frame animation that contains contains 12,984 individual frames.

Thomas is a self-taught animator from West Virginia. He says he “mistakenly ended up in Philadelphia after dropping out of Temple University and found shelter in an old-warehouse that had no windows to the outside world.” It was here where he animated his first film, Hi-Five the Cactus.

The puppets are generally all wire and epoxy armatures with fabric bodies and clay faces and extremities.  The background started as a painted backdrop and eventually evolved into a digital projection.  “I preferred the projection over the painting,” said Thomas. “I learned I could transform the set easier and actually composite the vultures in the background and shoot them in sequence to the animation.”  

The lightning strike, however, was actually sculpted.  For this Thomas wrapped a stick with tinfoil and moved a couple spotlights around to achieve the effect.  “The nearby storm cloud was actually glued to a sheet of plexiglass which hid most of the lighting rigs,” added Thomas.

When asked about the incredible camera movements throughout the film, Thomas eagerly noted, “I feel as though animating the camera is almost as important as animating the characters.  I want to feel like I am the same size as the puppet or I am actually moving with the puppets while I'm watching the animation.  This to me, is most exciting!”

The camera movements were all created with a couple rigs modified by Thomas over the years.  “One was a lighting boom which I mounted to a tripod head to and the other was a linear slide that also had a connecting tripod head.  The ‘hand-held’ scene inside the shack before Hi-Five returns was shot on the linear slide by pivoting the camera head the opposite direction I moved the camera.  I suppose its the same concept as the ‘vertigo-shot’ just on a pivot.  For the POV scene where the cowboy pulls his revolver out and points it at Hi-Five, I actually zip-tied two really long puppet arms to the camera.”

Thomas’ debut production is a must-watch. Story written by Jay Purdy. Original score by Crooked Tooth and the Story Tellers. Winner of 4 Awards, 7 nominations and + 30 Festival screenings (5 international)…so far. Learn more at hifivethecactus.com.

Neum, a town on the Adriatic Sea in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is hosting its 14th edition of the Neum Animated Film Festival, or NEFF, from June 29 through July 5, 2019.

StopMotionPlanet encourages animators and students from around the globe to take advantage of this opportunity to submit up to three films for consideration. The deadline for submission is April 15, 2019. Films must be produced after January 1, 2016. Visit the NAFF website for more information or view the entry form and rules here. Be sure to let us know if your film is selected for projection and/or recognition!