Learn turn your still pictures into stop-motion animation movies.
If you've ever seen a LEGO minifig band performing on TV or if you've seen a "Wallace & Gromit" adventure, you've witnessed stop-motion animation. Stop-motion animation films first appeared more than 100 years ago when filmmakers took still photos of objects, clay creations and drawings and then spliced those still shots together on slide or other film to create a moving picture. Today, a common stop-motion animation technique involves creating projects from a series of still images taken with a camera, which are then uploaded to a computer into an animation program and edited together with a stop-motion animation software program.
Instructions
1. Select a stop-motion animation software program such as Stop Motion Pro, Windows Movie Maker or Virtual Dub and install it on your computer. Gain familiarity with the art of stop-motion animation by creating a short animated story on a dry erase board. Design a storyboard for your film that details scenes that your character(s) will move through.
2. Set up a digital camera on a tripod two to three feet away from the whiteboard. Set your digital image size to "small" or "medium" on your camera to keep the overall size of your project down. Draw your initial scene such as a stick figure with his hand raised as though he's ready to wave. Look through the viewfinder or use the camera screen to verify that the entire image is in the screen where you want it to be.
3. Ensure that the lighting in the room is adequate to give you a clear, crisp image. Snap two shots of your drawing on the white board. Make a slight adjustment to the character in accordance with your storyboard and take another two photos. Understand that 24 pictures are equal to one second of film, but by taking two shots of each image, you only need 12 separate images to make up one second of film. Set a short length for your first stop-motion project, such as one minute.
4. Keep character movements very slight and think through all the individual motions that must occur to make a character complete an action.
5. Download photos to your computer and save them in a place that's easy for you to remember (note that if you use a webcam your photos will automatically be saved to your computer and you will not have to download them). Import those digital images into your stop-motion animation software program. Add a title and credits as well as sound effects and music, if desired and save the project as a video.
6. Burn the video file to a DVD and share it with others on a TV or post it to a personal website to share with others online.
