Every motion picture you see at your local cinema is made up of a single image that is changed 24 times each second. Whether it is Scarlett Johansson sashaying down a street or Po the Kung Fu Panda crashing into a wall, all of the glorious, exciting, delicate, captivating scenes are made up of a single image, replaced 24 times each second.
You can take a movie camera, hit “record” and shoot a scene in seconds, or mount a still camera on a custom-built contraption and meticulously shoot hundreds and hundreds of photographs, painstakingly put them all together using complex techniques, and end up with the same thing. Why would you ever do that? To save huge amounts of time and money, of course.
Stop frame video's time has come in the advertising industry. It's certainly not new - the Disney cartoons of your youth are essentially hand-drawn stop frame video. But various factors have conspired to make it highly attractive to both ad agencies and brand managers at the client:
You can shoot an entire TV commercial using just stop frame, or you can mix it with video footage, or use it to refine or change video footage, often at a fraction of the price of shooting video, and in a lot less time. And the best part in stop motion is that because you're shooting each of the frames using a medium format stills camera, you get your stills for billboards, Internet and print advertising for free, at the same time.
The most common use of stop frame right now in advertising is to add end tags to TV commercials - there's the whole setup of actors doing their thing, the zinger of a punchline, then a short ending sequence with some product shots and the brand's payoff line.
But it can do an awful lot more.
Package substitution is a very useful one: you have your expensively shot commercial, your gorgeous models, conceptualised by a genius and directed by a master - and the packaging people change the look and colour of the bottle being carried across the room. You could redo the whole commercial - or get a good stop frame expert, who would duplicate the exact lighting conditions of the advert, and then move the new bottle across the room in a set of carefully calculated steps, exactly matching the original camera angle and lens focal length, shooting each step. Touch up, drop it into the offline edit suit, apply any necessary effects, and then digitally replace the old bottle with the new.
Presto - you keep your art, the audience sees only the new package, everyone is happy. I did a package substitution job for a client that cost R45 000. It would have cost them R1.8 million to redo the commercial.
The cost benefits are one thing - the creative benefits are another.
Imagine you've done a TV commercial using stop frame of a product. You simultaneously spin out a creatives for the billboard and magazine campaign (because the pics are super-high resolution)… and then you use the images to create an animated web ad (the nature of stop frame sequences makes them exceptionally suitable for compression) and then use the same images to create a “spin-able” 3D image on the product page on your website.
Stop frame has limits - it is hard to capture natural, continuous movement of people or liquids (although you can use this to great creative effect). But used in conjunction with videography, it is amazingly powerful. You just have to “see” it.
