Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Stopmotion Movie Options

We are learning how to create stopmotion movies in the Microcomputer Applications course I am teaching this fall. These are the different options we came up with to create stopmotion movies, after production (taking the photos) is finished. On a computer running Windows XP:

  • Open the folder containing all your photos. In the left sidebar, click VIEW AS SLIDESHOW and press the right arrow key repeatedly to see your animation (or hold it down to see it really fast.)
  • In PowerPoint, create multiple blank slides (control-D to duplicate an existing blank slide), then insert each picture by copying the picture to the clipboard from the folder, then pasting the picture into the “Normal” view on blank slides.

With PowerPoint XP, you can insert multiple photos from a single folder by opening a blank PowerPoint presentation and:
1. Go to Insert – Picture – Photo Album
2. Select from disk or camera
3. Select your pictures (Hold down the shift key to select more than one)
4. Click insert

Windows software options for batch inserting multiple photos into a PowerPoint presentation befor PowerPoint XP include:

We did discover a good trick so you don’t have to manually rehearse timings:

  1. Go to slide sorter view
  2. Click the TRANSITIONS button on the top toolbar
  3. Under ADVANCE SLIDE, choose AUTOMATICALLY AFTER and set the time to 00:00.3

This makes every slide play for exactly 3/10ths of a second when viewing your show.

We also experimented using Windows Movie Maker2 (free) to quickly insert all our stopmotion images. First, before importing, go to TOOLS – OPTIONS and click ADVANCED. Beside PICTURE DURATION click the down arrow to reduce the default duration from 5 seconds to .375 seconds. Then click IMPORT PICTURES, navigate to the folder containing your digital pictures, click on one of them and press CONTROL – A. This will select all the images, then click IMPORT. I have a Quickstart guide for Windows Moviemaker available on www.wtvi.com/teks/moviemaker.

If you enjoyed this post and found it useful, subscribe to Wes’ free newsletter. Check out Wes’ video tutorial library, “Playing with Media.” Information about more ways to learn with Dr. Wesley Fryer are available on wesfryer.com/after.

On this day..


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

2 responses to “Stopmotion Movie Options”

  1. […] How ’bout creating some hot dog art? Better yet, make a stopmotion movie with your own hot dog art characters! This Japanese website has great photos and even instructions (with helpful diagrams) on how to create these amazing shapes. Those who follow through here may never look at another hot dog the same….. […]

  2. Ale Avatar

    Hey!
    I just read this, and I think that NO microsoft software is fine for StopMotion…Even with Movie Maker, you got a max fps of 12, so it’s pretty much useless….Why don’t you try some free software like MonkeyJam, which is a freeware made for StopMotion and hand drawn animation?
    If you want to see all my movies and get some stopmotion tricks, check http://alestopmotion.blogspot.com
    Thanx and Bye!