Forums | MacLife

I'll give another vote to istopmotion.  I haven't used it a ton myself, but do know some other folks who have played with it more than I have, and we've all liked it.

Edit - For your audio, you may want to check out Magpie.  Their basic version is Windows only, but the Pro version is Win and Mac OS.  Very helpful in making sure you get lip sync with your characters.  http://www.thirdwishsoftware.com/magpiepro.html

Last edited by Mercury52 (2006-03-23 6:24 pm)

It took a few (I'm not sure exactly how many) hours to do the animation, then about 15 minutes to edit.
I tried doing a paper one once, but I gave up because the way I was doing it created a lot of work for myself. I had a character who was talking, but I couldn't get replaceable mouths to look good, so I ended up substituting the entire character every time with one that had a different mouth, then lining it up exactly with the character from the previous frame. I got halfway through the 40-second animation and then quit.

My son (who is 9) does a lot of clay animation.  The easiest system and least expensive we use is to use our Nikon 990 (set to basic for smaller files) and shoot 100-300 shots per scene with the digital still camera.  We then import the file and store in separate folder for each project.  We then go into iPhoto and make a new roll with this folder and then build up a specific album with up to 500 photos (there is an upper limit on this but new software version may have increased this).  We then to into iMovie and import the photos from the album to make a clip. We use the 3 frame per photo default but you can go to 1 frame per photo if you want.  At 3 frames per photo we run at an effective 10 frames per second which is Ok for animation.  Movies run at 24 frames per second but would use 2 copies of each frame for animation and would then be an effective 12 frames per second. So 10 photos per second is pretty good.  Anyway, with a 9 year old, it would get too tedious if you needed more photos and wouldn't be fun anymore. So then you are limited to about a 50 second clip.  But you then make a new project and import your separate clips to build the complete movie.  Then add in sound or add it in the clip  We have gone up to a 9 minute movie doing this and his movies have been shown at several film festivals.  We will probably progress to other software with time (iStop motion probably). But this has been a good way to get started.