Remember when you were a kid and you’d make flip books? On one page you’d draw a stick man in one position and then, like a cartoonist, you would draw a succession of many stick men, each on their own page. Then when you would flip through the book with your thumb and watch the stick man perform whatever animation you had created.
Well, now that we have digital cameras and computers we as adults can be kids again, making digital flip books like this:
My wife and I made this movie as part of Vacation Bible School at our church this summer. It’s not professional, but it was a lot of fun to make and I think it’s fun to watch. Now that you know what the end result looks like, let me tell you how we did it.
The supply list
- A digital camera
- A tripod
- A friend
- A computer
- Video editing software functionally similar to Windows Movie Maker
Step #1: Take your photos
For this kind of project I found it easiest to use a tripod and a friend. I suppose you could do this without a friend if you had a remote release but hey, who wants to be alone? The tripod is virtually essential as it is much more stable than your hands and the end result is tremendously better than if the camera is hand held. The goal is to create a movie in which only the subject is moving and if the background is shaky or the camera changes position even slightly it tends to ruin the effect.
Find a place to shoot your photos and decide ahead of time what path you want to take. Then go to your starting point and have your friend snap a picture. Move a little along your planned path of travel, stop, and have your friend snap another pic. Do this until you reach the end of your path.
It’s worth mentioning here that when I had my friend snap the photo I made sure I always had the same expression on my face and my body was in roughly the same position. I chose to keep my knees together for consistency and my feet behind me in each photo until I got close to the camera and then slowly stood up.
Step #2: Import all your stills to Movie Maker
Open Movie Maker and in the Movie tasks sidebar select the option called Import pictures. Select all of the still photos you want to use in this movie by Ctrl+click or Shift+click. Once you’ve selected all the photos for this particular movie click Import.
Step #3: Adjust storyboard settings
Before we add any of the photos to the storyboard we’ll have to change some settings. By default Movie Maker will display each photo for 5 seconds. This will not create the desired effect. We need Movie Maker to cycle through the photos very quickly.
Go to Tools > Options > Advanced and change the Picture Duration from 5 seconds to 0.125 seconds. Also, change the Transition Duration from 5 seconds to 0.25 seconds. This will create the effect we’re looking for: a rapid succession of still photos.
Step #4: Add stills to storyboard
This is simple. If your pictures are already in the order you want then you can select them all and drag the whole group of them to the storyboard. Movie Maker should order them appropriately. See my screen shot if you need some visuals.
If you don’t want to do it like that in bulk then you can drag each photo to the storyboard one at a time. In this way you could even make the movie run backward by putting the last slide first and working in reverse. Seeing a person going backwards up a slide, for instance, is always a pleasant effect.
Step #5: Prepare your audio
What’s a movie without some audio? Boring, that’s what it is.
Above the storyboard at the bottom of the screen click the option that says Show Timeline. Zoom in if you need to. You’re looking to see how long your movie is, note how many seconds, or minutes (which would be a lot of photos) your movie will run. Now you know how long your audio piece has to be.
To edit audio I always turn to Audacity. It’s free, open source and frankly, I’ve never needed to do anything with audio that this program could not accomplish. Keep in mind, however, that I’m not a recording artist ;). For Mac’s, I hear that GarageBand is the Pi
One Comment
im making this movie for fun it better be on you tube to!