Stop Motion Animation Software – iKITMovie

It can be difficult at times to decide the best approach to teach stop motion. Those new to the art of animation may prefer to follow written step by step guides whereas others much prefer video tutorials. Most people prefer to watch a video tutorial. ” A picture paints a thousand words” as they say to come up with good stop motion ideas.This  leads to a bit of dilemma for a website owner trying to promote stop motion. And as Google does not reward you for good video tutorials simply because it cannot see or understand the quality of a video content. On the other hand google very much likes written content. Thus you are sometimes forced to create a written tutorial in order that google pushes those interested in learning about stop motion to your site!

So the only solution to ensure that both your budding stop motion animators and search engines are happy I guess is to have a balance of both? I have seen some instances where a video promoting the topic in question has a transcription tagged underneath. Thus if you wish you can choose to read what was said or described and also watch the video on the same page.

There – I have got that rant off my chest! From now on we promise to put up more videos on stop motion and transcribe the content on the page also so that you can check on what has been said in writing. That should keep our stop motion animators happy and all search engines happy.

Of even easier still visit our stop motion tutorial page and browse at you ease to pick out what you like.

Bye for now guys. Happy Animating.

I have to admit to also not reading the manual when I should or not following the instructions accompanying a self assembly piece of furniture. So when I get questions which are answered on our site either in the FAQ or the video tutorials from users of the iKITMovie software I have to give a little smile to myself. I never mind answering these questions because they are firstly easy to answer and secondly our customers are always glad of the assistance. Also it’s great to get feedback and know that our software is being used by creative individuals of all ages around the world.

One common theme that runs through the majority of the hand full of  support calls is to do with image resolution. Especially when users are capturing their still images with a digital still camera. Most digital still cameras capture images at their maximum image resolution by default. So I have come across users who have captured their stop motion images at 3648 x 2736 and then loaded them into iKITMovie and wondered why it runs slowly. We step them through how to reduce them in size but it could have saved them time if they had viewed the Getting started video tutorial online.  Even if they had viewed the tutorial it is common to find that most people do not know how to check the size or resolution of the capture images once they have copied them to their PC.

It’s not generally known that it is very easy indeed to check the resolution of the images. By simply floating the mouse cursor over the thumbnail of the image on their PC the screen resolution is shown ( as seen in the image below )

Screen Resolution

Depending on the power and memory available on their PC we recommend at least 640×480 image resolution. 800×600 or HD 960×720 can also be used if they have say 3gb of RAM. We are considering creating a filter on import to automatically change the resolution size for users. They would be prompted if the image size is too large and suggested that they reduce the size to a predefined choice.
More later..bye for now. ,Diarmuid

In these recessionary times it’s good to know you can still get good results on a shoestring when it comes to building your own set for your stop motion movie. All you need is a few desktop lamps and a cardboard box! That’s it! Below you can see a simple setup used by my nephew James for his contribution to our stop motion movie gallery. A simple box lined in this case with black paper.

Simple Stop Motion Set

The backdrop James used is a photo of a digger in a quarry which suited his animation down to the ground. No need for Chromakey really with stop motion animation at this level. It complicates things unnecessarily and takes the emphasis away from the stop motion animation itself.

The reason for the cardboard box is to build up the sides around your character to avoid any shadows and reduce the influence of unwanted light such as windows and so forth. This is really important as each snapshot should have the same amount of light as the next. Otherwise you will get a flickering effect when the animation is played back. Thus spoiling the movie. Also the box is very useful for attaching your backdrop painting/ drawing or photo.

As for your lighting you can cut a hole and cover it with greaseproof paper with you lamp shining through. This softens the light in order to avoid hard shadows. Closing the blinds on your windows during the day is normally not enough to ensure a constant lightstream. As the sun goes behind a cloud you may not notice the difference in your set but it will be there on the photo.

Sunlight will vary from frame to frame

So make the small effort to visit your local store and get some boxes and good luck animating.

Diarmuid -