Animation basics: Homemade special effects - TED-Ed

Transcriber: Andrea McDonough
Reviewer: Jessica Ruby

How do you get from point A to point B? Why not spice it up with homemade special effects? A film is simply a series of images played in sequence to create the illusion of motion. If you manipulate those images, crazy things can happen.

We used a tablet and one of the many stop motion apps out there. How do you get from point A to point B? We started off by taking a bunch of pictures of Celeste in place. Then, just like stop motion animation, the character is moved just a bit before the next picture is taken, which, in this case, creates a sliding effect.

Here we use the oldest trick in the book. By alternating between photos of Celeste on-screen and off-screen, we've made her childhood dream of teleportation a reality. With a little creativity, there are a million ways you can use homemade special effects to make something as simple as getting from point A to point B much more fun.

If you're at a loss for ideas, try finding inspiration in your surroundings, like the refrigerator and your coat rack. You can even try incorporating everyday objects from around your house, like, say, umbrellas or binder clips. Wherever there is an object, there is an opportunity to make it come to life.

When humans are used in stop motion animation, that's called pixilation, a term coined in the mid-twentieth century, well before the word pixel was a part of our vocabulary. But these sorts of special effects are as old as the art of filmmaking, and thanks to today's technologies, can be reproduced in your very own kitchen.

Moving an object from point A to point B is a fundamental principle of animation. To learn more about the process and the tools we used, visit the "Dig Deeper" section on ed.ted.com.