How to Make a Stop-Motion Animation

You can do stop-motion animation with relative ease. It's not a very difficult process, though it is time consuming. With a little patience, a dash of creativity and the ability to move objects little by little, you'll be able to create your own stop-motion animation to make people look like they're flying, make toys walk and dance across a table top, or make toy cars look as though they're moving.

Difficulty:

Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Video or still camera

1. Choose what your stop-motion animation will be about. Let's assume that you're going to take an action figure and make it walk across the floor to meet another action figure.

2. Set up your scene in a confined place to make it easier to film. Set up your video camera in a stable place, preferably on a tripod so that it won't jiggle. You want to shoot the same area every time.

3. Put your figures in the first position you want them. Snap your first photo. Move them to the next position, and snap the next photo. Keep in mind that, for this method, you won't be filming them in action; you'll be snapping photos step by step, creating the illusion of motion through stop-action animation.

4. Make sure that you have enough photos of every piece of movement. Take many photos so that you can simulate a smooth movements for your characters. Move the legs little by little, and the arms, too, keeping in mind that arms and legs move in contrast to each other--when the right leg is forward, so is the left hand; when the left leg is forward, so is the right hand.

5. Open up a program such as Microsoft Movie Maker. Follow instructions for beginning a movie, and add your photos in, in correct sequence.

6. Use the feature to establish how long each photo will be displayed. Play with the timing, and see if a half second, or a full second, or some other fraction works best for your figures. When you run your file after saving it, you will have created your own stop-motion animation film.