I know this is an older post but, as an animator, I just had to add to the conversation.
I'll give you a quick run-down of how I would accomplish a 10-30 second playmobil film:
Pre-production
Know your story, and plan your shots. What is the plot? How many times will you switch camera angles? Will there be voices for characters, or just some nice music? You'll want to make a storyboard -- a comic-book like sketch of your story, so that you can figure out what has to be in each picture for the movie to make sense. (Here's a short one I made
http://www.draftindance.com/art/pierresosa_maa217_final-animatic1.mov). Use these sketches to figure out what you have to build, what you have to hide, and how many individual photos you have to dedicate to each camera change. For fun stop-action, you want to work at 6 or 12 photographs per 1 second of film. That means, if you are telling a 10 second story, you need to take 60 to 120 photos ** REMEMBER THIS**. This is why you need a good camera, as stated above.
Production
Small movements in between photos makes slow action. Big movements between photos makes fast action. You need both to make your story look good. If you spend 10 photos to raise an arm, it will look like a ballarina dancing. If you spend 2 photos to raise an arm, it will look like a baseball pitcher throwing a ball. Your storyboard will tell you if the action is fast or slow. Don't be afraid to have photos were almost nothing changes -- audiences like pauses to soak things in. Do wiggle the things in your background, though: flags and branches should wave in the wind. As to your background: 1) you could try a backdrop painted like a sky, or 2) depending on how awesome your post-production software is, you could just put up a solid bedsheet, preferably in a color not among the pieces -- like neon orange with pirates, or pink with the dragon castles -- then just erase that whole bedsheet with a trick called keying (green-screen).
Post-production
Good software. You are going to take all 60-120 images and save them to your computer. Theoretically, your camera already saved them as DSCM0001.jpg, DSCM0002.jpg, DSCM0003.jpg... and so on. Put them all in one folder, and call it something like "playmobil_movie01_frames". You can then open a video editing program, and import an "image sequence". An image sequence is a set of photos that will play back to back, in this case: 0001, 0002, 0003, 0004... and so on. In a good program, it will ask you for a "framerate" -- how fast the photos will play before the next one starts. ** DID YOU REMEMBER?** If you chose to do 6 photos per second, your framerate is 6 frames-per-second (fps). If you chose to do 12 photos per second, your framerate is 12 fps. A good program will also let you color-key (green-screen). You can tell the computer to erase 1 color from each photo, in this case the loud besheet that you hung up behind your scene. You can then paste a pretty picture behind your photo to replace the bedsheet. A good program will also let you add titles and audio (music, or digital recordings of people talking).
Here are some programs you can try:
http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects.html -- the one I know best and really like.
http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere.html -- one I know, but not as well
http://djv.sourceforge.net/ -- I don't know this one at all, but it is free and sounds good
You can run a preview (After Effects calls it a Ram Preview) to see if everything plays correctly. If you like it, "render" or "export" is a FLV, MOV, MPG4, or whatever movie type you like, and post it to Youtube! I hope you have a lot of fun creating film projects, and let me know if you need any specific help!
-P
