Hot Trends In Viral Video Marketing: Stop-Motion Animation

One of the best methods for aspiring viral video stars to learn their craft is observation.  Looking at what other successful video creators are doing is a fantastic way to keep your finger on the pulse of what the viewing public is looking for.

This isn’t a new concept. All kinds of web professionals, from SEO experts to web designers, have been known to look for inspiration in the work of their peers.  It’s one of the reasons that small and medium businesses seek out the consulting advice of Internet marketing firms—because they have spent more time in the online world and have a better grasp of the landscape.

One trend for 2010 that seems undeniable is the use of stop-motion animation in web videos.  While stop-motion has been around for decades as a technique, and has even been online in one form or fashion for as long as online video has existed, it’s seeing a surge in use this year, with a higher number of the most successful viral videos employing the style.

Looking Back

In just the past seven months we’ve seen the following stop-motion clips go viral:

• The T-Shirt War, or the creators’ follow-up McDonald’s commercial
• The hand-drawn student project entitled A Brief History Of Pretty Much Everything
• The similarly themed Big Bang Big Boom street art video
• The Paper Stop Motion Mario sensation
• The Lego Star Wars short film Lego – The Force Unleashed
• The candle-centric  Amazing Fire Animation clip
• OK Go’s time-bending End Love music video
• Patrick Boivin’s amazing At-At Day Afternoon piece imagining a Star Wars toy as a pet

That’s not a complete list, obviously, and doesn’t include anything pre-2010, leaving out such famous stop-motion clips as DEADLINE Post-It Stop Motion.

Sharethrough Powers Stop-Motion Campaign for LEGO

We’ve run hundreds of campaigns at Sharethrough, and as it turns out, one of our favorites is a stop-motion short film.  It’s a nostalgic and inspiring video from LEGO, produced by our friends at Pereira & O’Dell, and distributed through the Sharethrough platform.

Recent Stop-Motion Success from Levi’s

If you spend even a little bit of time online on a regular basis, you’ve probably seen one or more of the videos listed above.  They’re all viral hits.  And now they have a new member in their exclusive club:  Guy Walks Across America.

Guy Walks Across America is a partly-artistic, partly-educational video of a guy walking across America, passing skylines and recognizable landmarks along the way.  Oh, and he walks it in a minute and fifty-four seconds.  How?  With the magic of stop-motion animation.  The video is sponsored by Levi’s, and to us at Sharethrough it represents a growing trend in sponsored web video content.  Take a look:

The video has taken over the viral world for the last few days, appearing on every other website I visit and generating even more buzz with each new mention.  And rightfully so.  This is an inventive concept combined with some stellar execution.  It’s clear that a massive amount of planning and effort went into its creation.  All of those things helped this video go viral.

But the main reason it went viral is that it shows us something we haven’t seen in an inspiring way: a man appearing to walk across America in a brief period of time.  The visual style of a video incorporating stop-motion is like nothing else; it is sometimes beautiful, sometimes mesmerizing, but always unique.

Stop-motion allows filmmakers to do things that standard filming does not… to create motion from a lack of motion.  It’s special effects without the computers.  It offers the “wow factor” of high-dollar equipment and effects through a very low-dollar and blue-collar method, which is maybe part of the reason it’s so popular a style as of late.  Average users like you and I, with no computer graphics or other special effects training, can still create something larger than life.  But it does take hard work, dedication, and lots of time.

If you want to learn more about how the creators were able to make the Guy Walks Across America video, you can check out their behind-the-scenes video here.  It will give you a much greater appreciation for the finished product to see how much work is really involved in something like this.