A Video-based Interface for Hand-Driven Stop Motion Animation Production

Stop motion is a well-established animation technique, but its production is often laborious and requires craft skills. We present a new video-based interface which is capable of animating the vast majority of everyday objects in stop motion style in a more flexible and intuitive way. It allows animators to perform and capture motions continuously instead of breaking them into small increments and shooting one still picture per increment. More importantly, it permits direct hand manipulation without resorting to rigs, achieving more natural object control for beginners. The key component of our system is a two-phase keyframe-based capturing and processing workflow, assisted by computer vision techniques. We demonstrate that our system is efficient even for amateur animators to generate high quality stop motion animations of a wide variety of objects.