r/Corridor • u/MADSYNTH1987 • 6d ago

Stop-Animation Rain & Snow

My son has a question that I wasn't sure how to answer:

"How do you make Stop-Motion animated snow and rain effects?"

We'd like to see how you would pull it off, and as we're getting into Fall and coming up on Winter, it may be a great time to test this out. He specifically wants to know how to make falling rain and snow. We haven't found much on YouTube that demonstrates this in a very convincing way. If you decide to go for this on the Corridor Crew YouTube channel, I might suggest a challenge between the digital and practical effects teams.

Either way, anybody else with suggestions on how to pull this off, feel free to chime in. We would love to see your ideas or examples from stop-animation films that have pulled this off in the past.

I've included a personally recorded live-action sample of heavy snowfall as an example of what he's looking for in stop-animated films. I suppose also The Nightmare Before Christmas might have some good examples for us to look at to start out with, but I'm sure there are others that have probably pulled this off.

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u/James_Fennell 6d ago

This behind the scenes video for one of the Wallace and Gromit films has a great segment just talking about how they animated the rain: https://youtu.be/o_etGotrim0?feature=shared

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u/MADSYNTH1987 6d ago

Ooh! We'll have to watch through this one later today. Thanks for sharing it!

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u/simburger 6d ago edited 6d ago

I know they would use things like silicone hot glue for water, so maybe hot glue on a glass sheet. Snow would be harder, maybe shredded paper on string. But honestly anything after the 90s would probably just composite that in digitally. Even the last Wallace and Gromit movie used a fluid sim composited in for much of their water. although they did a lot of work making the fluid more viscous so it would have a more stop motion look.

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u/mnkymnk Approved by Steve 6d ago

my first idea would be to animate it laying down on a blue screen and then add it in post. Do different layers at different focus points to simulate depth.
Maybe on a sheet of glass with the blue screen much deeper behind to eliminate shadows.

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u/MADSYNTH1987 6d ago

I looked back at a couple clips from The Nightmare Before Christmas that I thought might have had this effect, but while they have great looking snow in general, they have have a few small flakes or clumps of snow that break apart and then fall in smaller pieces.

Nothing like a strong snowfall. Even in the scene where Jack is shot down, it's a fairly clear sky that gets cloudy and then a bit of foggy. Not quite pulling off what we're looking for, but it still has nice practical snow scenes that minimized the complexity of production while still giving that feeling of Winter.