Posted by: Marc_Spess on Thursday, July 03, 2008 - 09:56 PM
There is a lot of debate over CG films taking over stop motion. The truth is that computers can make a big difference in the look of stop motion for the better. Especially when it comes to things like smoke, fire, rig removal, environmental effects and style.
Carlos Lascano created a kind of stop motion CG hybrid film called A Short Love Story. It uses a lot of effects and camera moves most likely done in an editing program like Adobe After Effects or Premiere. Take a look at it here.
Big Studios have been using computers to accent stop motion probably around the time of Nightmare Before Christmas. In that film they used CG snow flakes during the final shots because it would have been too hard to do by hand. Well...maybe not too hard, but very very time consuming.
Recently Portland Oregon's Laika studio released a short film called A Dream for Hokusai. What they tried to achieve was a transition between 2-D drawn backgrounds into stop motion backgrounds. It's a simple process "so it seems" where they just fade one element into another as layers. Again it's probably done in something like Final Cut Pro or After Effects. Take a look at how it turned out here.
