Making a stop motion animated picture isn’t hard, but it does require a decent amount of patience and care. In this post, I will show you how you can make your own version of the above picture and how to get it hosted where people can see it!

Required items

Before we begin, you will need to have the following:

I used a Canon Powershot A630, tripod, Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft GIF Animator (download it for free!)

Make a plan

Think about what you want an animated picture of. Keep it simple, no more than a dozen or so frames of animation or else the end result picture will have a massive file size. We’re not shooting a movie here, just a quick scene. Use clay, legos, coins or children’s toys to plot out a quick scenario. Or do like I did and use yourself in the picture. Make sure you have adequate lighting and a “stage” to act out your scene.

Setting up

Attach the camera to the tripod and position it so it is aimed at the stage. Check the lighting and the camera view. The camera must remain absolutely stationary once you start shooting, so make sure it will capture the entire scene as it takes place. If your camera has a remote, use this to take the pictures as you do not want to disturb the camera in any way. If you want yourself in the animation and you do not have a remote, your camera must either have a timer or someone else will have to help you take the pictures.

Start taking pictures

Arrange the object(s) for the first frame of the animation and take a picture. Move things just a tiny bit and take your 2nd picture. Be careful not to change the camera’s position or the lighting from shot to shot! Shoot the rest of your scene in this way, frame by frame.
Once you are done, review your pictures one by one. Reshoot individual pics or the entire scene if needed at this point.

Edit your pics

Fire up your photo editor of choice. I recommend Photoshop.

Depending on how your camera was orientated, you may need to rotate your pics 90 degrees so they are “right side up”

If you’re using a digital camera or even a webcam, your pics will probably have a resolution of at least 640×480. The pics from my digital camera were 3264×2448! Such a high res pic uses up alot of memory, way too much for our purposes.
You will need to adjust the image size of each pic to a lesser size. After rotating the pics, I chose a resolution of 150×200. Resize each image and apply any effects now. I changed all my images to grayscale (this further reduces the amount of memory required by each pic).

Any resizing or effects used must be applied to every single image, or else your animation will be inconsistent.

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Animate!


Fire up your GIF animator program and import the pictures. Arrange them in order and set a slight delay between each image (5ms or so). You can preview the animation as you go. Your scene should now start to take shape.
You may want to have the image loop so it continuously animates. Like my animated pic, your scene may have to progress backwards to the beginning before it actually loops.
If your program features a transparency color, you may want to disable this.
Finally, save your animation in GIF format in an easy to find place on your computer. Now find it and double-click it. Congratulations! You’ve just made an animated picture.

Get your image hosted and put it where people can see it

Several free image hosting sites are available to choose from. I use imageshack.us for almost every image on this website.
Navigate to the hosting site and upload your image. If you’re using imageshack.us, you will then be presented with a thumbnail of your pic and several examples of html code to choose from.
Use the appropriate code for wherever you want to put your pic.

For example: If you want your animation to appear as a comment on someone’s MySpace page, then cut/paste the Hotlink for Websites code directly into the comment. The code will look similair to this

[a href=”http://imageshack.us”][img src=”http://img186.imageshack.us/img186/6710/animator2ds6.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Image Hosted by ImageShack.us”/][/a][br/]

Tips

Please feel free to leave any comments, ideas or suggestions.