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?

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