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2014
Conference Paper
Title
Computational Imaging for Stop-Motion animated Video Productions
Abstract
Creating movies using stop-motion technology remains to be a fascinating approach for story telling even in the era of digital cinema. A huge number of professional and semi-professional clips produced as fan-art which can be watched on internet video platforms serve as testimonial for the unbroken interest in unleashing creative potential using this technology. However, producing content using stop-motion remains a cumbersome task, which raises the production costs especially for full length movies. Consequently, a trend can be observed that even for successful television series which were originally produced using stop-motion the production scheme was changed to computer animation. Against this background, we propose within this paper a new production scheme for stop-motion-animated movies which has the potential to lower the production costs while increasing the quality of the resulting content. By using a static multi-camera array and algorithms from the field of computational imaging, our technology allows creating artistic effects in the post-production which are difficult to realize using conventional stop-motion production methods. Our approach allows changing the depth-of-field, smoothly moving the camera along virtual camera paths, and upsampling the frame-rate of the stop-motion-video in high quality. Thereby all effects are computed and applied in post-production, while all intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the cameras remain static during the whole production. To demonstrate the practicability, within this paper, we show results from a stop motion video which has been produced using the proposed approach.
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