The other day I decided that it would be a fun project to make a stop motion animation. To quote Wikipedia, stop motion is “an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence.” That is, you take a picture, move the object a little bit, take another picture, move the object a little, et cetera, until you think that the sequence of frames would make an interesting animation.
You don’t need to figure out much to do just the filming for a stop motion animation, but putting these frames together can pose as a tricky problem. Knowing iMovie probably wouldn’t work that well because it is designed to neatly combine average length video clips into one professional looking video, I did a little bit of research regarding consumer-grade software used to make stop motion animation. It became obvious that the best specialized piece of software for making stop motion animations was iStopMotion. This piece of software costs anywhere from $49.99 to $499.99 (depending on which version of the software you want to buy) and I simply didn’t want to shell out the cash for it. The second piece of software I bumped into was FrameByFrame. FrameByFrame is freeware, so I gave it a try. It’s a little buggy, but it works very well if your animation is very short. My animation was fairly long (738 still frames to be exact). So I decided to just make do with iMovie (I didn’t need to pay extra for it because I already had it).
Let me first say that I make this tutorial assuming you are using iMovie ’08, ’09, or ’11. If you don’t already own a copy of iMovie, you can find it in the Mac App store or in the iLife CD that can be purchased at your local Apple store. Anyways, on with the tutorial:
- If you haven’t done so already, transfer your photos to a folder on your computer
- Open iMovie
- Make a new project by going to File -> New Project
- In the window that slides down: give it a name, choose the “None” theme, and make sure that the transitions checkbox is unchecked
- click the “Create” button
- Go to File -> Project Properties
- Click the “Timing” tab (the one with a picture of a stopwatch)
- Near the bottom, there is a drop down list labeled “Initial Photo Placement”. Set this to “Fit In Frame”.
- Click the “Okay” button
- Open the folder that contains all of your pictures and drag them into the project editing area (by default, this area is in the top left and it says “Drag media here to create a new project”
- After iMovie is done importing all of your images, hover your mouse over the first image in the project
- You should see a blue icon with a little gear on it. Click on it.
- In the small menu that pops up, select “Clip Adjustments”
- You may want to fiddle with this later on, but, for now, set this to 0.1s
- Make sure that the checkbox for “Apply to all stills” is checked
- Click the “Done” button
- Get a nice preview of your video by hovering your mouse over the first image and hitting the space bar. If you would like to change anything, this is the time to do it.
- That’s it. We’re ready to export. There are many options of exporting, and you can see all of them by going to the Share menu. If you don’t want to share to a specific application (you just want the video file), then just choose Share -> Export Movie and choose your desired save location.
If you run into any problems, please leave a comment and I, or another reader, will try to help you!
I’m sure some of you want to see the stop motion animation I made using iMovie, so here it is:
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Muy bien, muy bien. Personally, i don’t have enough time to try this anytime soon, but it looks pretty cool. It’s nice that there’s a good freeware program for it.
Thank you for the (spanish!) compliment :)
Ya, it does take quite a bit of time to make any interesting animation. However, you can try making a simple animation that is 5-10 frames and loop it to produce an interesting result. That wouldn’t take much time at all.
I was surprised that such nifty freeware existed as well!
I have made stop frame sequences in old iMovie and you could get the frame rate to 24fps. In iMovie ’11 you can I can only seem to get it to 0,1s. And at that rate 24 frames makes a clip 3,8 seconds long. The animation is way too slow. You need at least 12fps for it to look okay.
Is there any way to change it?
In certain versions of iMovie you are limited to 0.1s, but here’s a little trick if you’re having that problem:
1)Export the movie with frames that are too long
2)Re-import the movie into iMovie and speed the video up
THANK YOU SO MUCH. I FINALLY FIGURED THIS OUT!!!!!!
You’re very welcome! =)
I’m glad that my article was of use to you.
Thank-you so much!! I was able to post my first very rudimentary still-to-motion clip with your instructions. One thing threw me off for awhile, which was that when I copied my folder of pictures into iMovie, they did not go in order. They were in some random order. I had to resort to inserting the pictures into iMovie one at a time to get them in order. Since I only had 20, it was do-able. 700+ would not have been so fun…. (iMovie08).
Cheryl
Hi Cheryl!
You are so welcome! I’m glad to hear that my tutorial helped you. Gosh, that is pretty annoying, I’m not sure what caused it (it’s possible iMovie tried to organize the images based on filename though, but I bet that your images would be in order anyways). It has never happened to me. It’s good to hear that things worked out for you anyways.
Thanks so much. This is by far the most easy to read, easy to understand tutorial I have found on the topic.
I did a experimental animation of just 90 pics and it worked wonderfully :)
Will be creating a unique valentines animation now :) haha :)
Thanks again for taking the time!
thank you for the tutorial!
Quick question: you mentioned looping the video if it’s really short. Can you tell me how to do that in iMovie? I’m wanting to post it on my blog as a continuous loop when people scroll down the page.
Thanks!
You are welcome! =)
Well, aside from the obvious copying and pasting of frames, you could export as a quicktime .mov file. Then, you could embed it with the LOOP property (see http://bit.ly/ABrZ98 )
But the best way to do it would be to make a GIF out of your frames. Export your video frames as images (in iMovie, Share -> Export using Quicktime -> “Select Movie To Image Sequence” in the “Export” option menu) and then use a program like GIFfun (get it here: http://bit.ly/zVGIpn )to create and export the GIF. This will create one simple .gif image file that, when embedded, will loop infinitely.
Good luck!
P.S. What’s the URL of your blog?
Thank you! I had to take a relatively small number of stills and turn them into a movie for a class, no way I would have figured it out and imovie help was not helpful at all. Grateful :)
You are very welcome! It’s good to hear that my tutorial was helpful to you. Yeah, iMovie support documents/bubbles aren’t terribly useful.
Thank you so much for this tutorial!
Your explanation was perfect and easy to understand,
looking forward to stumble trough your blog the next few days!
Hi there, great tutorial, thanks. Do you know if it is possible to set the time for each frame at less than 0.1s?
It is possible, and most likely, that your version of iMovie doesn’t let you set the time for each frame at less than 0.1s. There is a workaround though.
After you export your movie with frames that are 0.1s, you can create a new project and drag the movie file into the new project. Select the imported video and go to Window -> Clip Adjustments. There’s a speed option that will let you speed up the movie such that each frame is less than 0.1s long. After that, you can re-export the movie.
Doesn’t work with iMovie 11 – you can’t adjust the clip duration below .05 seconds in iMovie 11 so sadly the stop motion is a waist of time.
Actually:
“After you export your movie with frames that are 0.1s, you can create a new project and drag the movie file into the new project. Select the imported video and go to Window -> Clip Adjustments. There’s a speed option that will let you speed up the movie such that each frame is less than 0.1s long. After that, you can re-export the movie.”
Hi, I just took around 1000 photos and now I’m getting incredibly frustrated because I can’t figure out why my iMovie keeps on adding a transition!! Do I have some sort of crap version? I don’t even get the Timing option under the Project properties only more bloody transitions options, and the minimum time it let me set the frame time at is 0.2s!
My iMovie is silly, but you are brilliant: thanks a lot!
Marta
How do I set the project settings. 720p. 24 fps
Thanks Michael
Great tutorial. Thank you!
I’ve been googling “how to make a stop motion animation using imovie” for days now. DAYS! Thank you for posting this tutorial! Now I can start my winter project: “War of the Fruit Bowl”. When it’s done I’ll send you the url. oh I can’t!!
Hi, you’re instructions are awesome and so clear! Unfortunately I can’t seem to find the transitions or the apply to all stills checkboxes on my iMoive 09…is there anything else they might be called? Also which setting gets put to 0.1s? Because when I try to watch it, the whole thing is only 0.1seconds long. That must be where the two missing checkboxes come in?
Thanks so much!
I am 100% sure that these instructions apply to iMovie ’09. Transitions is usually off by default, so don’t worry about them.
The “Apply to All Stills” checkbox can also be found at Window -> Clip Adjustments. This also applies to the Duration field: in Window -> Clip Adjustments, set the duration field to “0.1s” .
thank you for the wonderful tutorial! sorry to exhaust an old topic, but on the subject of looping – I need to put my animation on a dvd set to loop for a gallery installation. Is the best way to accomplish this to export as a quicktime file with a loop setting, and then put it on the dvd? if you hadn’t already guessed, my tech skills are a little lacking.
If you have iDVD, you can follow this tutorial: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5415
If not, the way you described should work. Many, if not most, dvd players support looping via a setting too.
Thank you SO much for very clear steps which a non-techie Grandma could follow! My grandson took a lot of time taking 80 digital pictures step-by-step hoping to have his first little stop motion movie because his Grandma has iMovie. But I just couldn’t figure out how to make it WORK. Now I have. Thanks so much!
You’re very welcome! Glad I could help! I tried to explain it as simply as possible.