How to Create Project in iStopMotion

Series Summary

Stop motion is an animation technique in which several still frames are combined together in a continuous sequence to give the illusion of continuous movement. This technique was used for animated children's shows such as “Gumby” (known as claymation in this case) and in the work of European animation pioneers such as Ladyslaw Starewicz, who was the first flimmaker to use stop action to tell a self-contained story. Ray Harryhausen used stop motion to create monster effects for science fiction movies in the 1950s through much of the 1970s, including “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad” and “Clash of the Titans.”. More contemporary stop motion artists include Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay. Tim Burton used this style of animation for “The Nighmare Before Christmas” and “The Corpse Bride.”

In this free series of computer animation tutorials, you will learn how to create a stop motion movie using iStopMotion software. Our technology expert Matt Nichols explains the interface of this powerful program and tells you how to set the preferences to get started. You will learn how to configure your camera to work with iStopMotion, then how to edit the frames you have created using the onion skinning technique common to many animation programs. Matt also explains how to use zooms, grids and overlay options to make your movie look as professional as possible. You will also learn such advanced skills as lipsyncing your characters with a soundtrack you have created and loaded into the program. Wondering how to add a foreground or a background to your animation? This series tells you everything you need to know to create a simple movie using iStopMotion.

Video Transcript

"iStopMotion is a registered trademark of Boinx software, and I am in no way affiliated with Boinx software. In this clip, I'm going to be teaching you how to setup your project in iStopMotion. When you first start up iStopMotion, you're going to be presented with a screen that looks something like this. First thing you're going to want to do is give your project a name. I'll just name mine my first movie. Then you can save it wherever you want. You can save it on your desktop or wherever by clicking this tab here. I'm just going to leave it at the movies folder there. Underneath that, it says preset. You can change this to whatever you want. By default, it's going to create a 640x480 resolution movie at 12 frames per second. I'm going to change mine to DV NTSC, which is going to be full resolution, 720x480. If you live in Europe or somewhere else, you can change that to PAL, or if you want to go HD, you can select that as well. If you come down here beside frame rate, it says 15. I'm going to change that to 12, because in most StopMotion movies, it's going to be filmed at 12 frames per second. If you'd like something a little higher, you can set that as well. After you've set all your settings, just click create and you're going to be ready to create a StopMotion movie."