There are times when the art of stop-motion animation and computer animation are debated on, which one is better, which one is easier, which one is worth pursuing. I'm here to say: it depends on you.

Stop-motion animation is an old animation technique while computer animation is a booming industry. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. Speaking in terms of popularity, time, and cost of usage, stop-motion animation is not a worthy investment when computer animation can be done much faster and can accomplish visuals beyond the capabilities of stop-motion. But that depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

For those who prefer to feel and manipulate things physically in their hands, they should consider stop-motion animation. It requires a lot of patience and repetitive motion when it comes to stop-motion animation and it's a very tedious process. However, depending on your medium, it may take less time than computer animation to create. Stop-motion gives artists the advantage of having a tangible object to manipulate. If one usings real life objects like LEGO minifigurines, the characters and sets can easily be made. If one usings modelling clay, then sculpting and creating characters and sets, alone, may take as long as creating them on computer.

The biggest advantage of computer animation is that the artist is not limited to what they can create. Artists can create vast landscapes and sceneries and only taking up a few Megabytes of hard drive space to do it. Computer animators can create an army of characters with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks (after they've created the character, that is). The drawback to computer animation depends on the artist's hardware. Given a character, a scene and a camera's position and view, stop-motion animators can take less than a minute to manipulate a character and capture that frame. Given the same character, scene and camera positiona and view, computer animators may have to wait hours to render the same frame.

Take away the cost and popularity, the difference between stop-motion animation and computer animation is the medium and the sequence of the animation process. Both have their characters and sets made before animating. Both have their lights and cameras positioned and tweaked before animating. Computer animation has the animator create the character's sequence of movement first, then have the computer render the final sequence of images. Stop-motion animators have to plan the sequence of movements ahead and the final images are created with each movement of the character.

I don't call them "brickfilms" when they're CGI.

silents429 wrote:

I wanted to add my 2 cents despite this being old, but there isn't anything to bump. since this is still at the top of the page :s

Anywho, I hate animated CGI films, Its not a matter of laziness though, I do say sitting on a computer and rendering things, isn't to far from sitting in a chair and taking pictures, but actual stop motion is more creative, AND allows more creativity, If you ever notice when your limited or people are limited on supplies, they tend to bring out more creativity to compensate and you get a feel for it, and admire it.

With CGI you don't have limits and anything you want you make and thats that. It isn't as creative.

And no making CGI isn't a difficult task it just has a learning curve, its only time consuming. In comparison to Stop Motion which is easy to learn but hard to master.

And for nostalgic purposes I being 16 saw those old stop motion cartoons in my days and I just admire the work that went into it far more then some cruddy animated scene. Its all preference really, I seem to tick people off for hating CGI when it leaves the realm of practical use.

Is this all CGI films or just brick based CGI films?