If you’re animating under ceiling mounted fluorescent lights, just be aware that they cast shadows in every direction and stand far away from your set.Īll the other modes on your camera have automated functions taking place in the camera body. If you’re not using frame grabber software yet, find a device, like a Bluetooth shutter, that will allow remote access of your camera, so you can stand farther back. To rid your animations of shadow play, you must stand behind your light sources while taking photos. I was shooting on an old Canon Powershot and wasn’t using software at the time to monitor my work, so I was pretty devastated to see my shadow playing all over the footage once I had it all in editing. I lit one of my first animations with halogen work lights from home depot hung all over the room behind me and the camera. I’ve tried all of the posted techniques, acquired a lot of tools and recently implored the help of several professionals. Then there’s the endless forum posts of people experiencing flicker and the community throwing out every possible solution until the conversation fades away, or the OP’s flicker mysteriously ends.

There are many flicker tutorials online, but many of them are wrong or incomplete. Or that there was a lens or device I just hadn’t purchased yet. I’m not quite a professional, but I have spent a lot of time during those 10 years teaching the medium and scouring the internet for tutorials and tips on everything stop mo.įor my entire career, until just recently, I was working under the assumption that there is a magic wand solution to flicker that I just hadn’t figured out. You also should do all the basic staging and preparation things listed here to mitigate the flicker effect.Ī short background on my qualifications to make this. The quickest answer to completely rid your productions of flicker, is that you need a combination of manual lenses and longer shutter times than you may want, or have planned for. This video has all the content from this post along with visual evidence of the anti-flicker steps in action. A thorough and definitive look at the causes of flicker in stop motion animation and the ways to get rid of it.

Dragon frame animation