Animation basics: Homemade special effects - TED-Ed

Animation is used everywhere to communicate big ideas--in movies, television, and media. Do you ever stop and wonder about the magic of it all? And have you ever wanted to create your own special effects? TED-Ed animators show just how easy (and fun) homemade special effects can be.

Lesson and animation by TED-Ed.

[ShadowMageAlpha]

It's incredibly nice to see something less deep and philosophical on TED. It's a nice change of pace and gives little tidbits on how some stuff we take for granted works.

[TEDEd]

Hi! More information about software on our website (Click "View this lesson on ed.ted.com" in the video and go to the Dig Deeper section). Happy animating!

[JIEUN]

The key to making brilliant special effects would be creativity and imagination.

[defydog]

There were some really original ideas in there, and I really enjoyed how the process was revealed.

[fakjbf]

My school has a TV Tech class, and we had an entire unit on stop motion. I made one with pipe cleaner people doing a chase scene, which is a pain in the butt because the pipe cleaners kept bending so they looked different between frames. Then I starred in one of my friends where I was a guy making sandwich using only the power of his mind. It was fun, but took FOREVER to get all the frames, which is really boring when you can't move without messing up the whole scene.

[Left-Earth]

*"You can capture individual frames from a video to use with Stop motion software. and you can convert a video file into a folder of still images, and even choose how many frames a second."*

[huyked]

This is your chance to shine, and redo this to show TED what quality is all about! Will you take this challenge?!

[kathysanders]

That was so cool and interesting..I would love to learn more.

[kurtilein]

they just said "any cheap stop-motion app thar works" or something like that.

and really, its the only way to avoid advertising a specific platform, like apple or android.

you could also do it with a webcam or digital camera and a computer.

[samfields]

Awesome!!! More on animation, please. I'm going to try this.

[hellsbells]

Disagree, Jacob. The point is that anyone can do it, do it quickly, and do it using fairly common materials. Over producing the piece would make it inaccessible. This is both practical and inspirational for many a would-be animator. Loved it!

[denisodariuc]

Hi there, superb, what was a photo per second rate in your animated video.? Regards

[SincerelyVIIProductions]

Can this be done with video instead of pictures?

[veasnaman]

How to make a vibrated text (point A to point B)?

[alexandrumacedon]

why not spice it up but when someone gives u something spicy, they all go around it lol.

[JakeCakeful]

It's not negativity, I honestly think this video could use a lot of work. As I said. It's important to express your opinion, even if it's not all positive, and even thought I tend to keep negative comments to myself most of the time, this case is different; This is TED, who normally produce great quality, and unlike some other YouTubers, TED should be able to handle negative feedback and improve based on it. Anyways, it seems like my opinion is not the shared one, but I still stand by it.

[Aminuspeace]

niice, easy stuff to do when you know how to !

[SensibleMinded]

for the sandwich one could you just green screen it? as in film him making faces/ pretending to telepathically make a sandwich then take that a place it together with a stop motion of just the sandwich being assembled? as long as the lighting was the same it could work

[fakjbf]

It would have been more work, and we don't have the best green screen so it would have looked off. So why go through more work with more potential problems for a product that would have looked the same if not worse

[zjapp]

im an animator
a lego animator but i film it with a photocamera