Stop Frame Animation Tips?

Do you mean stop motion

The best thing I can suggest from experience is:
> Keep your camera and environment steady! Try not to move the background when you're altering your dolls position. A tripod is your best friend!
> Take as many frames as you possibly can; it's better to have too many than too few.

It's all pretty easy once you give it a few tries!

 

When doing BJD stop motion animation, I'd say tip #1 is wire your doll.
This increases the range of stable poses you can place the doll in, and makes controlling the increments when moving limbs much easier.

 

I would also suggest starting off relatively modestly, perhaps with a 5 frame GIF, until you get the hang of it. That way, if you make mistakes on your first attempt, you won't have wasted hours and hours.

A little 5 frame GIF avatar.

 

Bah. Time-lag-double-post-poo.

 

How did you get on?

I don't know what type of camera you have, but if you can possibly use a remote the video will look a lot better! Even with a tripod pushing the shutter can move the camera, as seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjr58mu29fA

Compared to using a remote to take the photos (however the light is messed up due to separate issue of bright sun moving behind clouds, try to ignore that!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxPIgIxPjRI

For my next animation I will definitely rely on artificial light, sunlight was not my friend!

Anyway I can't give much advice since I need to improve a lot myself, but hopefully you can learn from my mistakes :p

 

Alternatively you can use the Dragon stop motion software (http://www.dragonframe.com/) which connects the camera to the computer so you can take pictures by pressing a key on the computer, and it lets you easily play back the frames you've taken so far, which is a massive help when animating. Depends on how far you want to go into this though, you might be able to torrent the software but if not, then at least wait a good while before getting it, or don't bother at all

Dragon is compatible with most Canon and Nikon SLRs, not sure if you just want to try it out for fun or not though, when I first started out I just used an old low quality camera (until going to uni doing animation) ^^

And yeah definitely use artificial lighting, otherwise you'll get too much flicker LED lighting is the best option for preventing flicker but might be harder to get hold of.
Most stop motion animation is done on 12fps so roughly 12 frames (pictures) per second of animation. Good luck ^^