Zealous Creative is a team of passionate artists and writers who use live-action video, animation and books to tell stories and make emotional connections with audiences and readers. The entertainment and publishing house has earned 37 international film festival awards and been nominated for both an Australian AFI and an Academy Award.

What’s really appealing about Zealous’ productions and publications is the way different contributors work together in a shared vision to keep giving audiences more. Stories and characters introduced in films and videos are often further explored in subsequent books and graphic novels.

We’ve previously shared a look at Zealous stop-motions Allure and Zero in our much earlier days on The Planet. While the fantastic, inspiring, touching and funny Zero has been used in schools to teach social justice issues and inspired multiple books as well as memorabilia such as t-shirts, stickers and posters, The Maker has subsequently established a place of its own in stop motion storytelling lore through screenings at over 60 festivals and by raking in 22 awards of its own.

Uploaded to YouTube by Zealous Creative.

Director Christopher Kezelos and composer Paul Halley produced a magnificent, haunting film with beautiful animation, design, sound and music that also inspired a fantastic book. They’ve also posted videos that provide a look behind the scenes, show how they manufactured a key prop and reveal how various camera dollies were rigged.

Below, the Making Of video covers six months of production from concept illustrations through principal photography. Hourglass is the story of a desperate production team tired of waiting for an eBay order to be fulfilled turning to glass blower Mark Eliott to get the last prop on set. In Camera Dollies, director Kezelos interviews animator Mark Lagana about his industrious designs and use of recycled material.

Making Of
Uploaded to YouTube by Zealous Creative.

Hourglass
Uploaded to YouTube by Zealous Creative.

Camera Dollies
Uploaded to YouTube by Zealous Creative.

This charming stop motion from 2013 tells the story of the origin of Thanksgiving. It’s courtesy of the students of Springdale Public Schools in Arkansas as a Happy Thanksgiving PSA for Springfield District Television.

With creative props and sets, good storytelling and simple, yet effective animation this video shows us that you don’t have to be perfect to create good work.

The students behind this production learned valuable lessons about lighting, camera placement and continuity as part of the heuristic learning process every animator must experience and still produced a meaningful, memorable piece and a nice message, particularly for those of us in the United States during the Thanksgiving holiday.

Uploaded to YouTube by Springdale Public Schools.

Uploaded to YouTube by Carpe Donktum.

Claymation Christmas Celebration was a television special that originally aired in the United States in 1987. It was produced and directed by claymation legend Will Vinton, creator of the ubiquitous 90’s California Raisins ads.

Claymation Christmas features Rex and Herb, recurring Vinton dinosaur characters who introduce and discuss a series of Christmas tunes.

This “Carol of the Bells” sequence portrays a performance at Notre Dame Cathedral under the direction of Maestro Quasimodo by The Paris Bell-Harmonic, a group of church bells who strike their own heads with mallets to achieve their respective notes, with one bell constantly dawdling and enraging Quasimodo.

Uploaded to YouTube by Monitogo Studios.

Monitogo Studios recently succeeded in raising over $5000 on a Kickstarter campaign to fund their second brickfilm, Atlas. This comes after their initial success with Bound, released in 2015. Bound clocked in at 50 minutes and was shot over an almost-six-year period at twelve frames per second with 43 characters and over 60 extensive sets. Atlas, currently in production, is just as ambitious if not even more so. In this first video, you can see the level of attention that is going into each shot.

Director, writer and animator Greg Tull describes Atlas as “a stunning stop motion brickfilm about sacrifice and the power of love.” The film centers on a father, son and uncle who work at a railroad drawbridge control center set in the 1930's. A train is running ahead of schedule and a damaged rail line promises catastrophic results. With inability to contact the train en route, the three must make a critical and costly decision in a desperate move to save it.

According to Monitogo’s website, the artists at the studio strive to “capture the hearts of our audience and inspire them to glorify God through genuine characters, clever stories, and realistic worlds. Our niche specialty, brickfilm, has opened the door for us to use a medium that is little recognized as a serious filmmakers tool.  We hope to redefine that perception of the most loved toy of all time!”

Uploaded to YouTube by Monitogo Studios.

This second video is a wonderful inside look at the animating process at Monitogo.

On Atlas, Tull is collaborating with animators Jack Nop, Spencer Berglund and Benjamin Ely. Nathan Ashton is performing sound design, Micah and Monica Austin are contributing story, post production and visual effects and Rick Holets is composing. Monitogo animates on DZED Systems Dragonframe Stop Motion with post production in Adobe Systems Creative Suite 6 and CC.

Find Monitogo Studios: on YouTube / on Facebook / on Instagram.

Uploaded to Youtube by Purdue University.

It’s plenty cold on StopMotionPlanet so the winter conditions have us thinking it’s not too early to make hot chocolate and spread some holiday cheer.

The staff at Purdue Marketing and Media (and their toys) wished viewers happy holidays in this video shared campus-wide before the 2018-2019 winter recess.

Boiler Up!

With her Paper Parkour series of works, illustrator and graphic designer Serene Teh uses stop motion to celebrate the artistry of parkour.

“Nothing makes me happier than the notion of expanding my imagination to a piece of paper,” says Teh. “Of course I work on various media as well.”

With her parkour animations, Teh says she aims “to capture the movement and physical beauty of the traceur while traversing through the environment.”

See more of Teh’s Paper Parkour here.

Uploaded to YouTube by IAMAG.

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GIF of a portion of the animation at double speed.

Uploaded to YouTube by dinaa amin.

Stop motion artist dina Amin’s distraught glue gun returns in Glue Life no. 2. Amin says her second glue-inspired short was inspired by “my 2019 so far. I've been away for a long time from YouTube, and a lot of places. But I am slowly getting back to animating. This year every time I feel like I've got hold of balancing work, it falls apart again!”

Let's hope her glue gun can keep it all together for this inspirational animator.

Support Amin on Patreon and get access to exclusive things she posts only there. See more on Instagram or dinaaamin.com.

Uploaded to Youtube by Raz Koller.

Raz Koller is a writer, musician and stop motion animator originally from Tel-Aviv, now based in London.

He recently launched a surreal, dreamlike stop motion animation show called Broken Hills on his YouTube channel. It's a story told in six episodes with mini episodes in between along with twelve accompanying songs.

When asked about the theme of Broken Hills, Koller says, “The story is... Well... I don't really want to give away too much but let's just say that the story is perhaps not what it seems to be at first.”

Koller does all of the writing, design, animation, editing, voices and music himself. He works on his free time so it takes months to make a six- to seven-minute episode. He uses Newplast for the puppets and shoots against a green screen. The backgrounds are Photoshop creations and the editing is done with Adobe Premier.

We last posted a work by Dina Amin about a year ago in April of 2018. She recently shared another one of her works with us here at Stop Motion Planet.

“My very first lip-sync animation!

Uploaded to Youtube by dinaa amin.

“I am a product designer from Egypt who discovered her love for stop motion. Since I am a self taught stop motion animator, to teach myself how to lip sync this is what I’ve done:

”I recorded what the characters would say, I wrote it down phonetically to try and figure out what kind of shapes and sounds are there, then after I identified key shapes, I video recorded myself saying the script then traced the key shapes from my phone (just like how the pros do it, i know!) then I scanned these into photoshop and made a mouth set. I then imported my mouth set in Dragonframe and started testing the lip sync. I sculpted the tiny mouths from regular plasticine, made my characters out of regular items I had around and started animating.”

For more with Dina Amin, try these other links:
https://www.instagram.com/dina.a.amin/
https://www.patreon.com/dinaaamin
https://www.dinaaamin.com/

Uploaded to Youtube by dinaa amin.

And here is a making-of video by the animator explaining the process she went through to produce her stop-motion lip-sync animation!

The talented Kevin Parry recently shared a new stop motion animation experiment/instructional video. “So I have a bit of an obsession with animating household objects,” said Parry. “It's a super fun way to learn about animation - hopefully I can teach…a thing or two by making these kinds of vids!“

For this project, Parry challenges himself to animate a bar of soap. “I show you how I turn a regular bar of soap into a stop-motion puppet and the process of how I bring it to life through animation.”

The video at the end of the post is a must-see for StopMotionPlanet readers as it’s yet another opportunity to hear an animator describe his/her motivations and methods. Parry explain his rig and green screen setup and shows how he created three different soap puppets up to achieve his vision.

In the video, Parry encourages beginning animators to attempt household-object animation experiments like these with a plan to communicate an idea. He maintains that there’s no better way to learn how to use motion to create a performance. Other highlights to be gleaned include Parry’s description of his thought process that goes into communicating the performance in every single frame and when he uses a loop of the soap flip and a camera lens cap to answers one of everyone’s primary questions; how much to move the object being animated between frames.

“A lot of people ask me how to get started in stop motion animation and I always tell them the same thing,” said Parry. “‘Animate household objects.’ See what kind of character you can create. Use motion to create a performance, to create character. If you can use motion to turn any object into any character then you can be an animator.”

Uploaded to Youtube by Kevin Parry.

Follow Kevin Parry:

Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/kevinbparry
Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/kevinbparry
Twitter ► https://www.twitter.com/kevinbparry
YouTube ►https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzgkpehSWuFTQx9E8NkBqzw