How to make a good stop motion.

1. First, you must have an idea. You have to know what you are going to make. You have to know, and make a good storyline. Make a storyboard.

2.You must prepare your props such as clay if you are making a claymation video, puppets or action figures, a camera (digicam with manual setting, a webcam or a DSLR camera), and the most important thing, a TRIPOD.

3.Set up your stop motion set/stage. Make sure your lighting is good. A bad lighting will affect your stop motion quality. Place your characters/puppets according to your script/storyline.

4.Start capturing your stop motion. Your camera MUST NOT move. To get smooth movements, you must do easing. Search for "easing tutorial" on google. I will make a tutorial soon about easing. Make sure you use manual setting for your camera so that the lighting will be the same from the beginning till the end.If you use auto mode, the lighting will keep changing.

5.If you want to make a good looking stop motion and smooth, make a 15 frames per sec/fps or 24fps if you want to make a professional looking video.

6.Make your stop motion interactive. If you have more than one character in a scene, make sure they are moving and interacting with each other. Don't just make one character at a time.

7.Add dialogues, sound effects and music to your stop motion to make it "alive".Also, add some special effects in your stop motion to make it more fun. You can use softwares like Adobe After Effects, Sony Vegas, VisionLab Studios etc.

8.If you accidently move your camera, redo the scene AGAIN.

9.Remember to add title and credits.

10. Keep practicing and accept critics to improve yourself.

Tips** You must have a lot of patience and creativity. Originality is IMPORTANT. People love to see unique stuffs :D and put a lot of effort to make a perfect stop motion.

If you want to see good examples of stop motions, search for Patrick Boivin and Plamoo on Youtube. I highly recommend y'all to watch their stop motion videos.