Summarize the following:
As with other forms of animation, a storyboard provides a guide to the animators and a means to communicate to others how the story is to flow. As with pen-and-ink animation, stop-motion animation relies on creating numerous pictures of images to be displayed in rapid sequence to produce the illusion of motion. Stop-motion animation, however, normally uses three-dimensional objects, although this is not always the case. You can use any of the following for stop-motion animation: Paper cut-outs. You can cut or tear pieces of paper into parts of human and animal figures and lay them against a drawn background to produce a crude two-dimensional animation. Dolls or stuffed toys. Best known with Rankin-Bass' animated productions such as Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer or Santa Claus Is Coming to Town and Adult Swim's Robot Chicken, this form of stop-motion dates back to Albert Smith and Stuart Blackton's 1897 The Humpty Dumpty Circus. You'll have to create cutouts for the various lip patterns to attach to your stuffed animals if you want to have them move their lips when they speak, however. Clay figures. Will Vinton's Claymation animated California Raisins are the best-known modern examples of this technique, but the technique dates back to 1912's Modelling Extraordinary and was the method that made Art Clokey's Gumby a TV star in the 1950s. You may need to use armatures for some clay figures and pre-sculpted leg bases, as Marc Paul Chinoy did in his 1980 film I go Pogo. Models. Models can be either of real or fantasy creatures or vehicles. Ray Harryhausen used stop-motion animation for the fantastic creatures of such movies as Jason and the Argonauts and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Industrial Light & Magic used stop-motion animation of vehicles to make the AT-ATs walk across the icy wastes of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. As with pen-and-ink animation, you'll need to have a scratch soundtrack to synchronize the action to. You may need to create an exposure sheet, a bar sheet, or both. As with pen-and-ink animation, you want to work out the timing between the soundtrack and the animation before you start moving objects around. If you plan to have speaking characters, you'll have to work out the correct mouth shapes for the dialog they're to utter. You may also find it necessary to create something similar to the photomatic described in the section about pen-and-ink animation. This part of stop-motion animation would also be similar to how a cinematographer blocks out a live-action movie, even more so than for pen-and-ink animation, since you're most likely working in three dimensions as in a live-action movie. As with live-action film, you'll more likely have to be concerned with actually lighting a scene as opposed to drawing in the effects of light and shadow as you would in pen-and-ink animation. You'll probably want to have your camera mounted on a tripod to keep it steady during the shooting sequence. If you have a timer that lets you take pictures automatically, you may want to use it if you can set it for long enough periods to let you adjust the components during the scene. Repeat this until you have completed photographing the entire scene from start to finish. Animator Phil Tippett developed a way to have some of the moving of models controlled by computer to produce more realistic motions. Called "go motion," this method was used in The Empire Strikes Back, as well as in Dragonslayer, RoboCop, and RoboCop II. As with photographed cels in pen-and-ink animation, the individual shots from stop-motion animation become film frames that produce the illusion of motion when run one after the other.
Prepare the storyboard. Choose the kind of objects to be animated. Record a preliminary soundtrack. Synchronize the soundtrack and storyboard. Lay out the story scenes. Set up and photograph the components of the scene. Move the items that need to be moved and photograph the scene again. Assemble the photographed images into a sequence.