This is a Clay animation film made by school-age children using TVPaint Animation.
Although TVPaint is used primarily as a "paperless" animation system for drawing directly into the program with a Wacom tablet, the program also has a
video frame-capture feature and onion-skinning which permits Stop-Motion animation. In this film the students made good use of TVPaint's "
green screen" chroma key feature to place the clay animated fish into the sets for the swimming shots . They also used TVP to add effects animation such as the bubbles . In addition to frame-capturing the clay animation, they used TVP to animate the titles and the small school of fish swimming in the first shot.
UPDATE : in the years since I first posted this example of Stop Motion Animation made by students using TVPaint I had the opportunity to teach many online classes on stop motion animation , using TVPaint as the frame capture software. There are some advantages to using TVPaint because of the built-in digital painting tools , as well as the the FX functions such as chroma-keying ("green screen") , which can be used to digitally remove puppet rigging. During most of the time I was teaching stop-motion classes using TVPaint I had the students using HD Webcams such as the Logitech C910 , C920, or C930e which are capable of capturing very high quality images , especially if careful attention is paid to lighting . (also TURN OFF the webcam's auto-focus and auto-exposure. Use the Logitech Camera Control software or even better webcam control software like iGlasses or Webcam Settings to control the exposure and focus manually) However, one of the weaknesses of TVPaint for stop motion frame capture , compared to something like the industry-standard stop motion software Dragonframe , is that for years TVPaint was limited to using a limited number of Canon DSLR cameras (and then only using a plug-in on the Windows version of TVPaint, not on the Mac version of TVPaint) for the best quality frame capture. In most cases the best option for frame capture in TVPaint was to use an HD webcam which produced acceptable results. Now however there are some options for capturing higher-resolution images with DSLR cameras (both Canon and Nikon) using a couple of different applications:
Unfortunately, Spark-O-Cam is for Windows-only , so it is not a solution for Mac users.
An even better solution is to use:
This will allow for high-resolution frame capture into TVPaint from your DSLR camera or HDMI video camera. You can use it for capturing stop motion animation as well as shooting line tests of traditional pencil on paper animation. (attach your camera to a copy stand and shoot the drawings on an animation peg bar taped down securely on the copy stand platform.)
Here is a
playlist with examples of stop-motion animation made by students using TVPaint with HD webcams:
