Amateur filmmaking is one of my passions, and I've been shooting stop-motion films, usually with lego, for years now. Recently I began work on a roughly 25-minute film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness (you can see some test footage, and eventually the whole movie, on my YouTube channel). Here are some tips for your own work!
Camera Mounting
With stop motion, you can't shoot handheld: it turns out the human body is really quite bad at holding things still. Often I like to make my own camera setups to be able to adjust angle and framing. This is my latest quick-and-dirty custom camera rig, meant to hold a phone for shooting static or sideways tracking shots. I also use adhesive to steady the camera, which brings us to...
Duct Tape
In stop motion filmmaking, it's almost impossible to overstate the importance of holding down the stuff you're filming. Nothing is more frustrating than hand-animating a character for 200 frames and then being forced to start over because you bumped the set.
Lights
Lighting design and execution are oft-overlooked elements of shooting a scene. Anything from a bike light to a handheld flashlight to a lamp can serve to light your set. For one scene in Mountains of Madness, I built a set with lego lamps wired up to a battery back under the floor.
Colored Paper
This is one which may not be obvious to many beginning filmmakers, but I've found it essential in my own work. Colored sheets, usually construction paper, can serve as:
Filters for offset lights (putting a blue piece of paper over a bright white light can get you a nice bluish hue).
Reflectors for nailing down the right lighting (placing a black sheet offscreen cuts down on the amount of light bouncing back, while white paper is useful for filling in shadows).
Green or blue screens for chroma keying (since paper doesn't get "white spots", this is easier to work with than just building a green or blue wall with legos).
Stop motion is a very niche area of videography, and presents its own singular challenges with every shoot, but the simple beauty of a clean, crisp series of stillframes put together in sequence is something that standard video just can't match.
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