Creating Stop Motion Movie – Lego Mario

This stop motion video was made using Lego blocks

Stop motion is an animation technique where we take photos to create a video which appears to be quite unlike any video you may shoot directly. It is like taking a bunch of photos of an object (clay models, toys, people, and nature) which you move or change bit by bit as you continue to click pictures. Finally when the pictures are arranged in a sequence at a desired speed, it looks as though the object is moving on its own like in the flip book. It’s a fun animation technique which anyone with a camera (and a tripod would be good) and a lot of patience can do. You can also use toys with moveable hands and legs or clay to create a great stop motion movie clip of your own.

For this video my friend Gautam and I together created 5 different Mario characters.

 Even though I have quite a huge collection of my Lego which I have been collecting for past 18 years or so, there was shortage of blocks for creating the characters perfectly. Hence, we created a general Mario head which could be shifted to all 4 characters. This was convenient because all the 5 characters would never be in the same picture frame. We replaced the toy Mario characters and made him move a little forward for each picture. The result was as a sequence which made him look as though he was walking, jumping and entering pipes, in pursuit of his princess.

 We moved the camera along with his strides which was not an easy task. Shaky camera gives your video unpleasant jerks and we had to struggle to avoid this.

You may wonder how did we get the toy to jump or stop in the air without any support.

 This is the trick of Photoshop, which helps in removing the supports for the toys, in this case our hand or strings which was holding up the Mario in elevated position. Though it takes some effort to bring about the desired result, the final result makes you feel it was worth it.

We enjoyed making this movie and had quite some funny moments of our own.

After we rendered the movie to check out the final output, we were quite pleased with our own work. Check out our movie and give us your honest feedback so that we can improve our work. Suggestions are always welcome.