13 Creative Light Painting Animations
Light painting is when you use bright points of light and long exposure times to “paint” light into a photograph. You’ve probably seen numerous tutorials on the technique by now, but if you haven’t, we posted a brief tutorial on the technique about half a year ago.
In addition to single frames of creative light painting, numerous photographs can be combined to create stop-motion animation done with light painting photographs. In this post we’ve compiled an awesome list of light painting stop motion videos to inspire you. Enjoy!
#1: PiKAPiKA THE MOVIE
Japanese animation crew PIKAPIKA specializes in light painting, and incorporates many groundbreaking ideas and experiments into their videos.
#2: Lightpaint Piano Player
An animated character playing a real piano. The frames were shot with a Canon Rebel with 20-30 second exposure times.
#3: Lucky – All India Radio
This video, created by Australian animation company Dee Pee Studios, was created using glowsticks. Each scene typically took a whole night to photograph.
#4: Light Graffiti / Painting Stop Motion
Each photo/frame in this video took 30 seconds to a minute to expose.
#5: POWER PILL light painting
A creative short film about a man whose video game comes to life. It was done entirely with still photographs and light painting.
#6: SPFW – IG Light
A medley of different light painting animations.
#7: Light Painting
A commercial that utilizes light painting animation.
#8: Spider walk
A short, conceptual video of a spider walking that took two hours to shoot and half a day to put together.
#9: Light Painting Animation
A simple compilation of various light painting animations set to a beat.
#10: Electrobloom – Michael Bosanko
Conceptual video of a flower blooming. What’s interesting about this video is how objects are three dimensional when the camera moves.
#11: Light Painting
An interesting compilation of clever light animations by Zé Brandão.
#12: Sprint – Light Trail
A Sprint commercial that follows around a beam of light traveling around a city and ending up at a woman’s phone.
#13: Light Graffiti Fight
A stop motion fight that uses light painting in creative ways.
I think the concept of animation using light painting and stop motion is still relatively unexplored, and that some serious thought and a lot of effort could easily yield a super-viral video. Are you up to the challenge?