What Is Stop Motion Animation: And How Can You Use It For Your Brand?

Every brand wants to have scroll-stopping content on social. Content that stands out among the rest, making the viewer want more. Creative content that catches the eye with its strong story-telling and appealing aesthetic. 

Stop motion animation is a great way to accomplish this. Scroll-stopping, share-worthy content that leaves a doom-scroll dead in its tracks is just a stop motion away. 

What Is Stop Motion Animation?

Stop motion animation is an animation technique that marries photography with motion. A stop motion animator takes a series of photos of a scene where each photo slightly varies as the animator makes an object move from point A to B over a series of ever-so-slightly-different frames. When the stop motion photography frames are put into a sequence and played quickly one after the other, the object appears to move. In short, stop motion animation allows brands to bring their products or services to life in a seemingly magical way. 

Here’s an example of a stop motion we created for Rainbow Retreat, a vacation rental in Palm Springs, California. Learn more about this project here. 

Stop motion animation has been around since the early days of film and television. According to Smithsonian Magazine, stop motion first appeared in 1898 in a movie called The Humpty Dumpty Circus. Beyond the Instagram feed, stop motion exists in both short and long-form modern media including major motion pictures such as Coraline and Fantastic Mister Fox. 

However, you don’t need a major motion picture budget to bring your brand to life—stop motion animation can be created from the comfort of your own home with nothing more than your phone camera. Additional tools like Dragonframe and Life Lapse App help the everyday animator along the process. 

How To Use Stop Motion Animation For Your Brand

The beauty of stop motion animation (and what makes it stand out in the scroll) is the magical aspect of bringing inanimate objects to life! This opens the door to limitless creativity, all that is required is a mind that can think outside of the box. Tapping into your imagination and unlocking your inner child, unbound by the technicalities that bind our world to reality.

This is why we believe that all brands can utilize stop motion animation, not just product-focused ones. 

So, where should stop motions live in your arsenal of assets? Because stop motion animations can cover a wide array of topics, they can live across social organic social media, paid ads, as well as locally on your website, depending on their messaging and purposes. 

Stop Motion On Instagram 

With the algorithm placing heavy emphasis on video and creator-driven content, stop motion animations can help any brand better align within this structure. Wholeness At Work is a great example of a brand using stop motion animation to sell their products and share their stories in a playful and engaging way on social media. Bringing products to life adds a new dimension to their offerings, giving them playful energy and eliciting stronger positive emotions from their followers. Ultimately, their animations create more memorable and meaningful messaging that their followers will love.

Brands and organizations of all kinds can utilize stop-motion animation to share their stories. Creative Mornings San Diego, a breakfast lecture series designed for San Diego’s rich creative community, utilized stop motion animation to capture the zest and personality of their monthly events. Rather than sharing a single static image of someone enjoying their time at Creative Mornings, the stop motion animation brings a new energy to the post. The animation isn’t selling a product; rather, it sells the positivity and enjoyment that people gain when attending their events. This paints a more vibrant picture to followers, helping them establish their personality on social media, gain more event attendees and foster a stronger sense of community. 

TikTok Stop Motion Animation

The age of TikTok is upon us, and if you haven’t joined yet, you’re missing out on an entire up-and-coming generation of consumers: Gen Z. Unlike Instagram, TikTok is geared towards an unedited, less picture-perfect aesthetic, allowing brands to showcase their personality in a more humanistic and raw way. Because of this, behind the scenes content that showcases the people and hard work on the final result does well. Capturing a timelapse of what went into creating a stop motion animation, showing the final version at the end of the video, and adding a voiceover explaining the process is a relatively easy way to connect with audiences on TikTok. Moreover, stop motion animation is a creative and unique reason to produce and share content, creating more opportunities for your brand to branch beyond traditional marketing practices. 

Stop Motion In Paid Ads

Driving a digital marketing strategy through a paid ads campaign on social media can help drive new traffic to your website, build hype about a new product, increase brand awareness, capture new leads, and generally support your brand’s goals. That is, as long as the media you promote captures your audience in a unique and engaging way. This is where stop motion lends a helping hand. 

Beyond the algorithm, there’s a reason why TikTok videos and Instagram Reels reign supreme right now: humans have a short attention span. In fact, according to Marketing Insider Group, “the average ad on Facebook is viewed for only 2.5 seconds by desktop users. On mobile, that number drops to a mere 1.7 seconds.” 

Brands need to pack a punch in their paid ads efforts, especially given the reality of what little time they’ll have on people’s screens. It typically takes more than 2.5 seconds to verbally drive your message home, but with stop motion, you can quickly show your audience why they should pay attention and hit home your purpose in a visually engaging way. Doing so also expands your potential reach because it doesn’t require people to have their sound on to learn about your brand.

How To Brainstorm Stop Motion Ideas 

Knowing where to begin brainstorming stop motion ideas can be challenging. We recommend starting by looking at what content performs well on your platforms. Is there a similar theme or underlying message within the messaging? Do you take a unique stylistic approach? Use these insights to clue you into what type of stop motion content to create. 

Here at Zettist, our team of digital marketing experts can take this task off of your shoulders, accelerating and optimizing your media efforts with ease. Whether you’re looking for help on the strategy side of things, or if you’d like an experienced team to handle the project from conceptualization through execution and promotion, we’re your one-stop-shop. 

As always, it’s important to establish your brand for what it is: high-quality and valuable. Similarly, your content should look high-quality, too. Just like podcasts, music, and movies, production value goes a long way. Good-looking stop motion animation involves many moving parts: set design, lighting, editing, the right gear and equipment, a nice space to shoot in, enough time to create the magic you’re looking for, and creative direction. Fortunately for you, we’ve got you covered. 

With our own stop motion studio space, there’s no need to search “stop motion animator san diego” into Google, reach out to us here instead. We look forward to hearing from you!