Drawn Animation

In this post, I will talk about how I used iStopMotion to create a flip book animation and how researching animation helped me to understand how they used to create animation in the olden days when they didn't have the technology that we have now.

First of all, I drew the image of what I wanted (which in my case would be a firework shooting up and then exploding) onto square pieces of scrap paper; being careful to trace it the best I possibly could. When I was finished drawing and tracing the image from the original piece of paper, I then used a scanner as the first experiment. As the images didn't come out as well as I wanted them to, I used another method. I took an animation rostrum, a sony camera and a firewire cable. Then following onto setting the equipment up (Turning the screw into the camera to hold it in place, then plugged the firewire into the camera and then plugged the other end into the Mac) and then searching for the application "iStopMotion" on the iMac; clicking on it and then setting it up so that it would be at twelve frames per second and then set the Preset at DV PAL.

After setting everything up and placing the Sony camera the way I wanted it, I started to take pictures on iStopMotion one picture at a time. Whilst doing this I had to make sure that the pictures were in/almost in the exact same place so I marked the animation rostrum with pencil when I placed my pictures on the rostrum's work space. I could see the next picture because you were allowed to turn the opacity down on the image on the screen. When I had finished taking the pictures of the "moving" image, I took the camera off of the animation rostrum and then unplugged the fire wire; placing them gently onto the other desk along with the animation rostrum. The images that came out were better than using the images from the scanner so I decided that I'd stick with this method and upload the video once I had finished tweaking it. I watched the video over and over again to see if I had made any mistakes (Fingers in the way of the picture, the firework moving too quick, the firework in a totally different place etc).

I had to then export it and then save the video as My iStopMotion Movie Export. I exported it twice just in case it didn't work the first time (I couldn't find it the first time so I exported it again).  Making sure that I saved it into the movies folder and then exported it. I then looked into my movies folder and found that both had exported into it so I watched both to see if they had changed in quality. It had only changed slightly and I chose to upload the second video because it seemed more clearer when I had saved it.

After doing all of this and finally finishing, I uploaded it onto YouTube and waited for it to upload. when it had uploaded, I named the video "Firework" and left a description that said "Drawn by myself, made on iStopMotion and then uploaded here. Enjoy!"