tool
After Effects compositing
Capture technique
Overview
Adobe After Effects used as the primary compositing and post-production environment for stop-motion animation. In stop-motion workflows, After Effects handles three distinct tasks. (1) Rig removal: support rods, tie-down bolts and rig hardware that appear in-frame are erased using Content-Aware Fill (introduced in After Effects CC 2019), which analyses surrounding frames to synthesise clean background pixels; earlier workflows used the Pen Tool, Clone Stamp and manual frame-by-frame painting. (2) Chroma keying: puppets or set elements shot against a green or blue backing are isolated using the Keylight plug-in combined with Key Cleaner and Advanced Spill Suppressor, then composited onto the intended background. (3) Multiplane compositing: foreground, mid-ground and background layers captured separately are aligned in a 2D or 3D composition to add perceived depth. Additional stop-motion applications include frame-to-frame flicker reduction (via scripted exposure levelling or the Neat Video plug-in), Camera RAW processing for exposure consistency across a long shot, and subtraction of photographic artefacts introduced by sensor variation between frames. The workflow integrates with Dragonframe: Dragonframe exports captured frames as DNG or TIFF image sequences which are imported into After Effects as a composition. After Effects is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite and runs on Mac, Windows and Linux.
Connections
Split rule
Split into sub-pages for rig removal and keying once each has five or more sourced production case studies.
Next research action
Find a published production account (LAIKA or Aardman) describing their After Effects compositing pipeline in detail; add plug-in references (Neat Video; Red Giant) once sourced.