How to Make a Stop Motion Animation in less than an Hour
I have a series of random stop motion animations I decided to make using my daughter’s toy furniture sets as props. They were mostly linked in my old blog but I haven’t had much time porting them over or sorting them out yet.
This time I wanted to try busting a myth that creating these simple DIY stop motions required a lot of time and equipment. It’s actually really quite simple! It usually takes me 30 minutes to less than an hour to make it and some post-film editing.
Coming up with a quick storyline
For my stop motion which I will be featuring in my next post, I decided to do a little something with Scooby Doo and the upcoming Halloween. I made 3 short scenes and combined them. It didn’t initially start out that way, I made the first part only recently and subsequently decided to join them up to the other 2 parts.
Come up with a silly little short storyline that can just be a couple of seconds with a main focal point featuring some toys or some of your own artwork!
Equipment
My equipment to be honest is super simple. Something I accumulated over the years I guess, but they are multi-functional and it’s usually how I photograph my amis or take video tutorials anyway.
Main art piece to be featured
Accompanying props for the storyline
My iPhone
Lightbox
Small tripod to hold my phone
I’ll talk more about the software for editing later, also super simple. In this case, my accompanying props were the Mystery Machine and some tiny play furniture from my daughter’s dollhouse sets.
Filming the video
Since it’s a stop motion animation, it’s technically not filming but rather taking a series of still photographs that will be subsequently strung together into a video. Hopefully a video that makes sense.
I used an iPhone app called ‘Stop Motion’ that allows you to take a quick snapshot of all the photos and string them together! This is available as a free feature but you have to take the shots ‘live’, meaning you can bring out the old photograph images from your library (this will cost you).
Then it was just a matter of positioning. Decide on the positions for the main pieces and the props based off your storyline. Shift each piece just a little for the next photograph and repeat this new positioning subsequently until the scene is acted out. So you might end up with a series of 20 photographs with each piece shifted just a little during each frame.
Final video
You can really just stop here. The app will piece together all 20 photographs and play it together like a slideshow so it appears like a stop motion animation. You can decide on how slow or how fast the frame goes. I even purchased the other features (was not too expensive) to add on things like speech bubbles and backgrounds if you wish!
Optional post video editing
Just for the purposes of stringing together 3 separate stop motion scenes I made for this Scooby collection, I decided to just use the native iMovie App to join them all up together. Really nifty and easy, you can add on music or transitions or words as well to end off the video!
So that’s really it! Of course the first time you do it, it won’t be 30 minutes because you will be toying around with the software and the equipment. But as you do more, it’s really quite simple. I can’t wait to show you guys my final Scooby Doll Stop Motion Animation I prepared just for Halloween! Stay tuned!
