How to Create Characters to Make Stop Motion Animation

Unleash your imagination and make a film with items found right in your home through stop motion animation. While any object, from dolls to blocks to food, turns into the star of an animated film, clay is especially malleable and fun to work with when filming.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Digital camera or web camera
• Movie making software
• Clay

1. Decide what your want your characters to look like and mold them out of clay. The sense of movement in the film is comprised of many small moves so you might want to draw out the changes your object is making in small steps.
2. Set up a web camera or a digital camera on a tripod so the shots are steady. Sit your clay on a flat surface and take a picture. Move the clay, according to your drawings and take another picture.
3. Keep moving the object slightly and take pictures, stopping only when you have completed all the movements you drew for your object. For changes in texture, add elements such as plastic wrap and tin foil to your clay scenes.
4. Import your photos into a program such as Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere Pro or Apple Final Cut Pro. Drag the images into the timeline displayed and add audio if desired through a recording device or by importing an audio file.
5. Adjust the length between each clip, deciding how many images you want per second: the larger number of images per second, the quicker the object seems to move.
6. Preview the animation in motion and adjust images if necessary, then save the file as a movie. Once your stop motion animation is saved as a movie, you can upload it or save it to DVD.

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