OK, so you've chosen your 'subject' toys for your animation project. But don't start photographing them yet. Not until you have the right stage consisting of the right background or backdrop, the right 'floor surface', and the right 'props'. If you really want a great animation, you need to plan and invest in these things to produce the atmosphere that you want. This may entail building the scene from craft-making materials and then giving it a unique-looking finish.
There is, however, an alternative to this - you can photograph your toys against a plain background and then add your 'virtual stage' (consisting of digital images) to the photos later using your computer.
Whether you've decided to have a real stage or just a 'virtual' one for your animation, you need to provide good lighting to your toy subjects while photographing them. The faces and bodies of the toys being photographed must be illuminated sufficiently. They must not cast unwanted shadows on each other. Of course, part of creating a great animation is being able to play creatively with the shadows, so the presence of shadows per se is not bad. It's the unwanted shadows that must be avoided.
If you opted for a 'virtual stage', you must photograph the toys against an evenly colored (and evenly lighted) blue or green backdrop. Choosing a single and even color for your background will make it easier for the computer to replace it with the digital image or video that you want to use for your background. Note that the toys used in your animation must not have a color similar to the color of the backdrop.
Use a tripod in photographing your subjects to make your photos sharp. Apply the basics of good photography, taking into consideration the right angle of shot for each particular scene. To reproduce the motions intended for your characters, many frames must be taken for each scene. You will need to incrementally move the toys in the scene for each frame, take the photo, and then do this again and again until the moving scene is completed. You need 5 to 25 frames per second of animation, depending on the video quality that you're after.
Once all the photos are taken, you are ready to put them together in a single animation video using the video editing software of your choice. A common and easy-to-use video editing tool is the Windows Movie Maker. Just drag and drop the images into its video track in the right sequence, adjust the duration of each individual image, add an audio clip to the audio track, and then save the project as a movie to produce your animation.
Unfortunately, Windows Movie Maker can not add backgrounds to videos automatically. Thus, if you opted for 'virtual backgrounds', you need to add these to the frames one at a time (using an image editing tool such as the Adobe Photoshop) if you're going to use Windows Movie Maker as your video editing tool.
If you don't want to do this, you can use more sophisticated video editing tools that can automatically add the virtual background on a separate video track, but these are usually more expensive and more complicated to use. Some animation software can even let you do the photography against a virtual background in real time, allowing you to check each frame in the animation as you go along.
See also: What is toy animation?; How to choose toys for animation
