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!
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I am working on a starwars stop-motion. I got a majority of the animation done over the past couple of days but I am stuck on one very important thing in the animation. I cant figure out how to make it look like some objects are floating. I would just use after effects, but I dont have it yet, I do have photoshop though.
Please help me on this, thanks.
Last edited by Triscuit520 (December 14, 2015 (02:15pm))
Most Brickfilmers have a feature called masking, where you brush away areas of a current frame, and replace it with that same area without the rig/brick with which you are using to raise a certain object up. This feature goes under the name masking, or sometimes rig removal.
First, you need some type of rig to hold the minifigure in the air. I personally recommend Helping hands, which you can get from Amazon or Harbor Freight (maybe some hardware or craft stores). If attached to an object from above, you can preserve the shadow below.
Walking rig by Chris Boyer, on Flickr
However, if you don't have those and can't get them, a LEGO-built rig is the next best thing.
(Something like this is best, but this is the next best thing)
Next, you take a photo of the background (without the minfig or helping hand). You put your minifig there, and animate it without changing the camera, lighting, or ANYTHING. (Actually, the best way to do it is to take a background-frame between every single movement so you can mask perfectly, but that is more time consuming because you have to match the frames perfectly every time which is an absolute pain).
Then, in a photo or video editor (you can use After Effects, Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.net, etc), you import your frame (with the minifig) into the software, and import the background-frame on a layer BEHIND the minifig layer. Using an eraser tool, or a simple mask, you get rid of the rig that holds up the minifig.
Congratulations, you have a masked frame.
Last edited by rioforce (December 14, 2015 (02:46pm))
Thank you to every won that helped me out on this. And thanks for doing it so fast to:) .
I do it low-tech:
method 1) put object on a clear element.
method 2) I made an eagle fly in HOO episode 1 by making a studded "sky", then adding this piece below to the back of the eagle:
http://img.bricklink.com/P/11/30359a.jpg
The eagle concealed the element when I attached it to the sky.
Masking is the way to go! There's a program called Bafran which was made specifically for this purpose, if you don't have/want to use Photoshop or whatever.
If you want a decent tutorial, I found the one by Fancy Pants to be very useful, when I first learned how to mask objects. He uses a version of Photoshop, so that should help. It shows basically what everyone else has said.
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