Amazing LEGO Volkswagen Beetle 10252 Stop-Motion Build
As a photographer, this video is especially cool for me to get to break down for you guys. There are a couple of ways you can use photographs to speed up a process that takes longer in real time and compress the action into a shorter timeframe. There’s time lapse, which is commonly used for capturing the stars moving across the night sky and the rising and falling of the tides, as well as construction of massive ships that take weeks to assemble. Then there’s what is known as stop motion, which is similar to time lapse with one key difference.
Both methods use a camera set to take a photo every so often – depending on the situation, it can be as often as several times a second to as few as a frame day or even every few days, though most often you’ll find a shot every few seconds to be ideal – and then compile them into a file that displays them quickly, like a movie. The main difference between the two is time lapse is used to capture a scene over time with no interference or interaction from the photographer, while stop motion allows for the camera itself to be moved and for the shooter to actually change the subject.
A perfect illustration of stop motion is this LEGO assembly video. You can see the each brick added to the build, meaning that’s another photo being taken by the photographer. Not only does he move the bricks into place, but he moves the whole car and even repositions the camera to capture some of the more intricate parts of the assembly process.
To be clear, this isn’t an easy process. It can be tedious and it’s easy to run hours of progress with one slip of the hand if you aren’t extremely careful, but the finished product is, as you can see, pretty damn cool. For those interested in this process, just google it. I would suggest starting with something small and less tedious for your first project with either time lapse or stop motion, but once you get the hang of how it works, both are a lot of fun and can create some truly breath taking content.
