I made a fun little looping animation of a skateboarding duck made with stop motion animation. This project was made for a Stop Motion course on Domestika. The course is called: “Introduction to Stop Motion: Create Animated loops” by Victor Haegelin. He is an amazing Stop Motion artist better known as @patagraph on Instagram.

Victor is good teacher, and the course will help you make professional stop motion, but the course is a bit challenging because there are many things going on in the final project such as gravity, spinning skateboard tricks and lots more.. It also uses Rigs and software such as Dragonframe and After effects, so I think the course is ideal for people you are already interested in Stop Motion and want to take their skills to a professional level. It might be a little difficult for complete beginners.

Link to the Stop Motion Course on Domestika.

If you want to practice making Stop motion animation, then you can try out my monthly Stop Motion challenges on Instagram. Each month I give a simple challenge out so that people can be motivated to try something new. Click to read more about the challenges.

Behind the Scenes of the Skateboarding Duck

Here is a quick timelapse of how the animation was made:

This took about 3 days to animate, because I animated at 24fps. Plus a few more days making ramp sections, the set, clay characters, and removing rigs, adding sound in post production. So maybe 7-8 days in total.

The mini skateboard is made for finger skatebaording. I made 17 ramp cross sections but it was too slow when I used a ramp section in each frame, so I often skipped a ramp section between frames, (as Victor had suggested on the course).

Made using Dragonframe software and a Canon 700D DSLR. Removing (Masking the rigs) done in Final Cut Pro.

Song: Once Was by Kwon (Youtube Audio library)