Before you read that article, better look at what stop-motion (frame-by-frame) animation is. When you read the topic, you may ask that is only iMovie enough to make a stop-motion. The answer is half-yes if you are going to make an animation with photos taken with your webcam. But people mostly do have cameras and take frame photos (better your camera has that property) and create an animation with those thousands of photos they took.
For this article, I used Canon D50 to make a short animation. I took more than 100 photos for that 10-second animation.
The example animation:
So, step-by-step, what you can do to create this kind of animations:
Step 1 - importing photos: First, you pick a theme and take photos of the action with your camera, like I took 100~ photos of the movement. Then connect your camera to your Mac, import all of the photos you took.
I used iPhoto to do that. (After opening iPhoto your camera would appear in the list.)
The last thing I did is creating an album named “hodja”, then copying all photos into that folder to use later in iMovie.
Don’t forget that the order of photos is important.
iPhoto would import your photos in name order as default.
Step 2 – using iMovie:
Now, in iMovie, create a new project in Project Library.
And click right to the project, select Project Properties. On the window popped out, go to Timing section and make the changes shown in the photo. We do that because as a default, iMovie would use Ken Burns effect for your photos in your project and the duration of each photo would be 4 seconds. Of couse 1 second duration per photo would not be fast as we desire, so we will see how to change it in the following paragraph.
Now, enter the empty project you created. On the right side of iMovie, click on Photos button and select the album you created in iPhoto. After that, select all photos in this album (you can shortly use cmd + a keys) and drag them into your project. It would take a few minutes depends on the quality of your photos.
After the dragging progress is done, double click on one of your photos. Inspector will come out. (You can click on Inspector button too). Change the duration value to 0.1s, less, or whatever you wish. You can also pick a video effect for your photos but of couse it’s optional.
After that, you can delete some photos if you want to take further steps of your action. You can do that frame jump with your camere if it has that property. I think I deleted nearly 80 photos in my stop-motion animation, because I wanted to show the jump between frames clearly.
Step 3 – export the animation: Now, you are done. Just go to Project Library, and click right on your project and Export your movie however you like. That’s all.
Step 4 – adding music to stop-motion animation (optional): Same as you added your photos, now click on the music section in the right section of iMovie and drag the music file you want to add. Easy.
Versions of programs while this article was written:
iMovie ’09 – 8.0.6
iPhoto ’09 – 8.1.2
PS: You don’t have to use iMovie to create stop-motion animations. You can do that by using any movie maker programs in Mac world such as iStopMotion or any one.