Weblog of Wesley Fryer

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:

• Image Importer Wizard $35
• Pixerter (free to try, $25 to buy)

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.

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• Highlights from Septemberfest 2008 - 2008
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