I created this needle felted stop motion animation project with my friend Erin Pasternak awhile back. She felted the ocean creatures and together we took turns moving the creatures and taking photographs frame by frame. When we were done, we used an ai program to generate an undersea background! 

Steps to create your own felted stop motion animation

Materials needed

• Felting needle
• Felting surface (like our earth friendly jute felting bags)
• Wool
• green sheet or posterboard
• a few lights that can move around easily (clamp lights, or a ring light)
• a tripod
• a camera or phone
• a video editing program or Tiktok has a green screen feature ( I used Adobe Premiere)

Steps to create the animation

1. Felt some creatures using your needle and wool. Make sure to use a felting surface so you don't break your needle on the surface of a table.
2. Find a green sheet or piece of posterboard and place it on a table or the floor
3. Setup your tripod with your camera or phone facing downward towards the green fabric or cardboard
4. Do some test shots placing your felting creations on the green background to make sure your lighting isn't casting too many shadows.
5. Start with your creatures out of the frame and take a photo
6. Move your creature(s) into the frame and make sure you remove your hand before taking another photo
7. Repeat this process moving your creatures just a small amount each time after you take a photo. Keep in mind there are 24 frames in just 1 second, so you'll need to take a couple hundred photos for just a few seconds of film
8. When you're done bring your images into a video editing program and drag them onto the timeline in order they were taken(as a group)
9. Shorten each still photo to be 1/15 or 1/10th of a second long. You can do this in bulk to all photos instead of one by one.
10. After adjusting the length of each still photo, watch the sequence to see if the motion is fast enough or too slow and adjust the length of your stills according to which duration of still makes your movement look good.
11. If your editing program has a green screen feature, apply it and choose another photo or video you want to use as your background. If you don't have a green screen feature, export your video and apply the green screen in Tiktok and add a photo or video background there instead.
12. You're done!