Bricks in Motion
We are a friendly filmmaking community devoted to the art of stop-motion animation using LEGO® and similar construction toys. Here, you can share your work, join our community of other brickfilmers, and participate in periodic animation contests!
A place to discuss, share, and create stop motion films.
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Most professional animation companies use 24fps and alternate between taking one or two frames. It seems the standard way of animating, but when it comes to brickfilming, pretty much everyone uses 15 fps. 15fps isn't used much in animation and I was wondering why we favour 15 fps over 24 one ones and twos?
I think a lot of us use 15 fps for two reasons. The way I and many other brickfilmers actually convert frames to animation is to take pictures directly from the camera and import them into an editing program. Since a lot of editing programs default to 29.97 fps, animating at 15 fps is easy because you just set each image to last 2 frames. The bigger reason is that it's just a good frame rate for LEGO Minifigures. Minifigures are very small as far as stop motion puppets go. Yes studios like Aardman use 24 fps, but the puppets they are animating are five times bigger than a Minifigure. That means that to animate a minifig at the same frame rate as a regular puppet, you have to use way smaller movements. Minifigs are small enough that they can be animated at 15 fps and be very convincing in their movements. Yes, 24 fps looks better, but it's so tedious and so much work that not many people do it, especially when you can make an extremely good animation at 15 fps. 
24 fps is the standard for traditional motion pictures and by extention, traditional animation. Most home viewing units are 29.97/30 FPs, and that is the reason for the switch.
I'd just like to mention that I've still yet to see any evidence that 24 fps on twos makes the least bit of sense for films shot digitally (assuming you want the film to run at 12 fps).
I kind of suspect brickfilms.com got into 15 fps because it was one of the default settings on Monkeyjam when the majority of us were using it, and it happened to be between 12 and the 24 fps. As for why people use it now, I'd imagine it's at least partly due to our older directors recommending it. I doubt most brickfilmers really cared about the framerate standards for television (I don't recall much discussion on the topic)- they just wanted something that was smooth and relatively easy to film.
I was wondering, is it worth stepping up from 12fps to 15? It is that noticeable and worth the effort?
I'd say it's worth it to switch from 12 to 15. It's not that much more work when animating, and it tends to look a lot better, assuming it's done right.
I'd just like to mention that I've still yet to see any evidence that 24 fps on twos makes the least bit of sense for films shot digitally (assuming you want the film to run at 12 fps).
I kind of suspect brickfilms.com got into 15 fps because it was one of the default settings on Monkeyjam when the majority of us were using it, and it happened to be between 12 and the 24 fps. As for why people use it now, I'd imagine it's at least partly due to our older directors recommending it. I doubt most brickfilmers really cared about the framerate standards for television (I don't recall much discussion on the topic)- they just wanted something that was smooth and relatively easy to film.
Using 24fps on twos does make sense to an extent. You can alternate taking one frame or two frames using 24fps which means you can effectively have two different frame rates alternating. So if someone were to kick a ball, the preliminary steps to the ball would probably be on twos but the majority of the motion of the kick and the ball flying would be on ones :24fps. This video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNSovtpOzl8 uses 24 fps and does the ones to twos thing and it looks pretty smooth to me.
But digitally it isn't necessary that you take two images to slow the footage down; you could just as easily export your 12fps footage at 12 and your 24 at 24 and edit them together. Taking double the amount of pictures would just require double the storage space.
The ones and twos thing comes from classical hand-drawn animation, when the drawings had to be photographed onto a film reel. Most of these cameras were 24 fps, but doing hand-drawn animation at 24 fps was too much work and too costly. So they took each frame twice, making it 12 fps . However, some fast movements look too choppy at 12 fps, so 24 fps was used for those kinds of movements.
But now, with digital frame capturing, we can set any fps we want. I don't know about everyone else, but I found that 15 fps is a good framerate to use because it produces smooth animation for all speeds of movement. Even though 24 fps is smoother, it would take a ton of frames. So 15 fps is a nice medium because it produces smooth animation without having to take a tremendous amount of frames.
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