Stop-motion is an amazing animation technique which lets you bring inanimate objects to life. The beauty of stop-motion is that by using this technique you can do many things as if by magic. Watch this short video. How many animation tricks do you see were used?

Well, first of all, figures made out of clay do not move by themselves – they don’t just come to life and wake up one day with their own character, dreams, and plans. The illusion of movement was created by taking a photograph for every frame in the sequence.

On several occasions, you see objects disappearing and then magically re-appearing again at a different place, or slightly changed. This can be done very easily by taking a photo of the object, then removing it from the set and taking another photograph. When you play back the frames, it will look as if the object magically disappeared. The same applies to objects changing colour; you simply replace them.

When you are making a clay animation, you can very easily animate magical appearances like the one where the bunny jumps out of the magician’s hat. First, take a picture of the hat, then take another picture, this time with bunny’s ears pointing out of the hat, then you add his head, take a picture, then his body, take a picture, etc.

In a similar way, you can also make things appear as if they were growing, like the plant in this video.