Animation - Basic Rigging

A little Photoshop knowledge is assumed here, but if you need any help with this please ask and we can arrange to run through it with you.

Rigging can be useful to help you achieve shots that would otherwise be impossible to capture using stop motion, for example something leaping through the air, or tipping up at one end.

A lot of the time when rigging is used, it is edited out of the shot later using Photoshop or a similar package, this isn’t always necessary if you place your rigging carefully, but we’ll cover it here as even well placed rigging can cast shadows which will later need removing.

You also need to think about whether the rigging will obscure another element of the animation, which could cause you a lot of extra work.

Rigging can be made out of anything that does the job, for example when animating the shoes below, I used a selection of tins and jars, as well as an old classroom clamp from a science lab – I used the same clamp when working with the birdhouse that we’ll use in the walkthrough.

Shoe animation using simple rigging

Still from shoe animation showing tin as rigging

For this walkthrough, we’ll use this simple animation of a birdhouse lifting up from a table.

When you need to use rigging, the basic approach is quite simple; before you setup your shot for animation, take an image of the background with the same camera position and lighting you’ll be using in your shot.

So for example, this is a shot of the table which we’ll be using for our walkthrough animation.

Setup the shot with the rigging as necessary, and shoot as you would normally. You need to bear in mind that any changes of camera angle or lighting will require another shot of the basic setup, for use when editing out the rigging.

The position of the rigging is important here; because the birdhouse will be lifting high enough for us to see the bottom, and we can see the front and both sides of the birdhouse, the rigging had to be attached to the back. We will also be able to see the table behind the birdhouse when it lifts from the table, so the stand for the rigging was positioned to one side of the shot.

Here is the table with the birdhouse in place, attached to the rigging and ready to shoot.

For this example, the shots were very simple and we only need the one shot of the table to use for editing as the camera angle and lighting never change.

Once all the shots were taken, we can take our initial (blank table) shot into photoshop, and have it setup as a background layer.

From there, we can paste the shot of out birdhouse with the rigging over the top, and if we’ve done things properly, everything should line up nicely – check this by toggling the layer on and off, or adjusting the opacity.

Once we’re happy that our two layers line up, we can use photoshop to erase the rigging from the top layer, leaving the setup shot to show through.

Here’s our first frame with the rigging in place;

And with it edited out;

We continue this process for each frame that needs rigging removed, and then animate as normal.

During this process you might run into problems with shadows, hard edges, lighting changes etc – don’t be afraid to use other photoshop tools to make the images work, clone stamp, and airbrush tool (to fade erased lines and rework shadows) can all be useful during this process.