Stop motion animation is a great technique for creating attention-grabbing content to promote your own brand or photography, or even just for fun. In this article, I will show you how to take and combine a series of still photos to create an eye-catching stop motion animation.
As a still photography enthusiast, I have always leaned more towards photography than videography in my work. But a picture can be worth a thousand words, sometimes a moving picture can be worth a thousand views when it comes to attracting more people to pay attention to your web content. In a sea of text and static images, stop motion animation can be an effective way to attract attention online – bridging the gap between video and still images to convey a short but impactful message. powerful impact in a concentrated burst of joy and creativity.
Record clips
As a long-time resident of New England and a fan of cold beer, I thought it would be fun to do my own test shoot of a promotional animation for one of our fine local beers , especially since I just happened to have a cold one in my refrigerator! My extremely simple storyboard for this 3 to 4 second clip was to start with a full bowl of tortilla chips and a full glass of beer, both placed next to the empty beer bottle. During the clip, the fries will disappear from the bowl and the beer will disappear from the glass.
And that’s pretty much it – just the simplest plot you can imagine.
To emphasize the refreshing aspect of the beer, I wanted to use a cold bottle straight from the fridge and clearly see some condensation dripping down the bottle throughout the clip. To enhance this effect, I sprayed some water on the beer bottle at the beginning of the clip. However, the inclusion of this extra detail means that I will now be there to film the clip before all the condensation flows out of the cold bottle or dries as it heats up.
While we’re on the subject of timing, one of the advantages you have with stop motion animation is that you don’t need to plan your clip around the frame rate you need to create motion. true. Video is typically recorded at frame rates up to 24 frames per second to achieve this. But to create the kind of splashy movement that’s almost always required for animated GIFs, you can easily achieve a frame rate of 10 to 15 frames per second. For the 3 to 4 second clip I’m planning, I think I’ll therefore need to shoot about 30 to 60 images.
With this in mind, I can now draw up a concrete plan for the photo shoot. I’ll start with a full beer and a bowl full of chips. Between each frame, I’ll drink some beer through a straw so I don’t disturb the glass, and occasionally take some chips out of the bowl. Knowing how many frames I would shoot allowed me to plan my chip and beer consumption to complete both frames in the allotted time.
One side note – having to drink a beer through a straw for about 2 minutes led to some incredible belching episodes in post-production, but I guess even photographers suffer because your work of art!
The equipment I used to shoot is as follows. I lit the scene with a few LumeCube Studio console lamp and one LumeCube RGB Pro 2.0 panel. I shot this scene with one Leica SL2-S The camera is equipped with a Leica L-mount 24-70mm zoom lens. The camera is connected to me wirelessly Apple iPad Pro so I can control it without having to leave the scene or touch the camera and risk camera shake.
Image processing
One of the details you need to pay attention to if taking photos for animation is maintaining consistent color and lighting balance across all images in the clip as much as possible. Even though the lighting for my scene remained constant throughout the photo shoot, it was still important to make sure I applied the same tone settings to all the photos. Internal image processing Adobe Lightroom makes this very easy as it allows me to copy and paste my develop settings across multiple images.
Create animated GIFs
There are a few different ways to convert the final images into frames and stitch them into an animated GIF. Many video processing software packages offer the option to export clips as animated GIFs, but I think I’ll use that Adobe Photoshop because I use the Adobe photography software suite extensively for my work, and I imagine many of you probably do as well.
The first step is to load the processed images you want to use in your GIF, as stacked layers in a single image in Photoshop. With the images arranged in correct chronological order in a folder, use File > Script > Load files into stack menu command to load images as layers. Be careful though! When creating your clip, you’ll find that the chronological order of the files in the folder will create a clip that starts at the end and runs to the beginning, so you’ll need to reverse the layer order. Menu commands Select > All layers And Layer > Arrange > Invert will fix this for you.
Now you’re ready to create your clip.
Menu command Window > Timeline will open the Photoshop Timeline panel at the bottom of the Photoshop window. If the small menu in the middle of the Timeline panel has no content Create animation frames, select this option and then (with all layers still selected) click this menu to load your layers into the Timeline. Initially, you will only see one frame, but if you click the Timeline menu (three small bars at the top right of the Timeline panel) and select the Create frames from layers, you’ll see all the frames in your clip arranged in a Timeline (like this).
Next, you need to set the duration of each frame to get the total time you want for your clip. I’ve already processed 35 images, so I set the frame duration to 0.1 seconds to create a 3.5-second clip. Select all frames by clicking the first frame and then – while holding down the Shift key – click the last frame. With all frames selected, you can use the small drop-down menu on any frame (looks like a down arrow) to select the frame duration.
Finally – use File > Export > Save for Web (Old) menu command to export your clip as an animated GIF. The dialog box that appears will give you the option to resize your animated GIF if needed, and be sure to select it Forever inside Loop options if you want your clip to play over and over again.
The extremely simple example presented here illustrates the basic steps in creating stop-frame animation, but the complexity of the animation you create is really only limited by your imagination and time. and the effort you’re willing to invest in planning the plot and adjusting scenes between frames.
