It’s Halloween tomorrow – one of our favorite times of year – and naturally we have a few tips to share to help make your stop motion animation projects suitable for the season.

Tip #1

There’s plenty of inspiration out there – use it! The Halloween period conjures up images of candy, ghosts, witches, bats, graveyards, haunted houses, black cats and much, much more. Everything is suddenly decorated in bright orange, green, purple and black, and your friends are turning regular pumpkins into works of art.

Creating an animation set with a Halloween theme is easier than it sounds. You can print out spooky pictures to use as backdrops, decorate a set with Halloween candy – or if you’re lucky enough to have a real pumpkin in your home, you can even film your characters playing with it (ask an adult for help if you want to animate your toys carving their own pumpkin, though).

With a little imagination, stretched cotton wool can turn into creepy cobwebs and leftover shampoo can be slime. If you usually animate mini figures or dolls, you can dress them up for Halloween by making simple witch hats and brooms out of crafting materials.

Even Google is getting into the mood with a free Global Candy Cup browser game for everyone to enjoy. Why not try recreating the little witch characters from the game in modelling clay and making a short animated clip about their adventures outside the game?

Tip #2

To create a ghoulishly good animation, try enhancing your story with sound effects which match the theme. HUE Animation Studio owners might already be familiar with The Nightmare Before Breakfast, one of the sample videos featured in our book.

No words were used during the animation; it’s a complete story yet if you watch it again with the sound muted you can see that the sound effects play a very important part. Small details like the pumpkins in the background and the wobbling of the terrified egg contribute to the feeling of tension.

(If you’d like to know more about this clip, you can find a step-by-step guide to recreating it in The HUE Book of Animation.)

Tip #3

Break the rules! We usually recommend animating in a well-lit environment so that your video is crisp and colorful. For Halloween, however, what you don’t show can be as effective as what you do. Shadows, creepy lighting, scratchy sound effects; it all contributes to creating a scary atmosphere for a fun seasonal stop motion animation.

We hope that all of our followers have a wonderful Halloween tomorrow, whether dressing up in costume for some trick-or-treating or staying at home to savor the spookiness and create some new videos.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a true Halloween post without some spooky stop motion from one of our young guest animators! (Owners of our limited edition Moshi Movies kit may recognize the cut-outs.)

Warning: This video isn’t suitable for anyone with a fear of plastic spiders.