The Joy of Destruction: Smashing, Guillotining, Igniting & More

Why is it so satisfying to squash, snap, squeeze and splatter? You know, squashing a juicy grape, snapping a twig, squeezing ketchup out of a packet—perhaps with your fist—or splattering mud across a sidewalk. But all of these actions are child's play next to animators Laura Junger and Xaver Xylophon's Joy of Destruction. The real joy of destruction is illustrated below—we're talking sawing ladies in half, exploding corn into popcorn with dynamite, burning cities, and rolling over statues with a tank—all wonderfully acted out in paper collage stop motion animation.

How did they do it? There's a great primer below on creating stop motion animations with Windows Movie Maker from Tinkernut, but for the HowTo curious (rather than the HowTo doers) the short answer is this:

Stop motion animation is a technique in which a physical object is moved in tiny increments—in the case of The Joy of Destruction, the objects are pieces of cut out paper, hence the collaged effect. Each increment is then photographed, with creates an individual frame. Then thousands of these individual frames are sequenced together in a software program—such as Windows Movie Maker or After Effects—to create the animated effect. The cool thing about the process is you only need a still digital camera and software to do it. The effects created above were assumedly done quite cheaply…but the process does require quite a bit of patience.

Are you the creator of amazing stop motion animations? Email your work to wonderment [at] wonderhowto.com and we'll feature it!