Animation Tips
These tips are for animators who are just starting out. They're based on my own experiences as an animator just starting out, so they should be quite relevant. I'll be adding them from time to time when one occurs to me and I can be bothered to write it down.
Tip 1: Be like Fonzie
Ayyyyy! Fonzie's a pretty cool guy right? How does he stay cool? Correctamundo! He's always checking his hair. You should too.
If you're animating a minifig, you have to keep picking it up, moving parts and putting it back down. While you're doing that, it's very easy to move the hair just a tiny fraction. Now, a miniscule change to a character's hair won't be too noticeable on its own but if you move the hair even just a tiny fraction of a millimetre in each frame of a 10 second scene, that can mean anything up to 150 tiny changes. Pretty soon you're going to end up with some crazy wig action going on.
The only way to guarantee that nothing moves is to glue the hairpieces onto all your characters, but that's a bit too permanent for a lot of people. So, besides ruining all your Lego, what can you do to keep that hair in place?
The most important thing you can do, as I said above, is always to check the hair. If your frame capture software has an onion-skinning facility, use it to switch between frames and make sure everything's where it should be. If you don't have onion-skinning, take a few reference pictures before you start animating, and keep comparing your minifig to them to make sure that the hair hasn't moved.
Even if you check your minifig every frame, some movement can slip through. If you find that a hairpiece is beginning to drift, the natural instinct is to try to correct it by slowly moving it back into place. Don't - it'll look really weird. Try moving the character's head a little (three frames to the side, hold it for five frames, then three frames back). It's perfectly natural for people to move their heads a little from time to time in real life, and it gives you a chance gradually to correct any problems without it being so noticeable.
Another option is the cutaway, or reaction shot (bear with me - I don't know the right terms). In most movies, the camera doesn't stay fixed on the character who's talking for the duration of his speech. Make a note of the frame number you're on, then put the hair back where it belongs and carry on filming your scene. When you've finished, film a short close-up of the character he's talking to and cut that into the conversation at the appropriate point.
Tip 2: Build 'em sturdy
Just trust me on this. If you're building props for use in stop motion animation films, make them tough and hard to move/bend/break.
That time machine might look pretty, but by golly it's hard to realign the dish after you've brushed it with your hand. Same goes for the levers, steering wheel and hinged things on the back.