"Millie - the Pocket Rocket" [3.6MB! - Quicktime] - My first quick film I made to get used to my handycam and iMovie
"The Magic Travel sleep Ball" [3.6MB! - Quicktime] - My first "proper" film. - A friend has set up a small group of 10-15 budding film makers to get together every 6 weeks, to share ideas and make films. So far (Sept 2003) we have been given two assignments. The subject of the films has been chosen by picking ideas from a hat. The first chosen was "Sleep"....
"Will’s new Bike" [4.3MB! - Quicktime] - I bought a new full suspension bike and this is a film of my first day out on it in October 2003. My co-riders Philip and Simon are keen on gizoms and they were keen to film while cycling - hence the travelling shots - see below about filming techniques.
Top floor bathscreen [4.4MB! - Quicktime] - This movie is in "portrait" format. See more about this on the house renovations pages
I don't know that much about stop frame animation, I've just always enjoyed things like The Clangers, Morph, Wallace and Gromit and Rhubarb and Custard.
I always fancied making a film, except I could not wait for my film to come back from the developers, and I wanted to be able to review what I had done straight away.
When Apple brought out their second generation iMacs with firewire and iMovie video editing, I had to get one.
As a Broadcast Engineer, I decided it must be possible to do stop frame animation somehow, and fortunately my Father had just bought a DV camcorder.
iMovie is incredibly easy to use. You start it up, plug your camera into the firewire port and it then tells you what to do on the screen - this is how software should be - the computer is the clever machine, I should not have to do the hard work - anyway enough of that.
[Here is an example of a simple movie I made of "Millie" the worlds fastest whippet 3.6MB!]
I found with iMovie, if I took lots of very short clips directly from the camera i.e. without recording to tape but recording live, then editing each of these clips to two frames and then dropping them on the time line, I could create animations quite quickly.
Here are two examples:-
Click to download:-
Film 1 - Moke - Quicktime 264K
Film 2 - Walking Robot - Quicktime 116K
If you want to read a little more about iMovie click here
Since using iMovie for animation I have also started using 'Frame Thief' which is another great programme. WIth this programme you plug a camera into your mac (USB, or firewire, it seems to support loads) and then you can grab stills straight to the Hard drive. Another programme (Frame Splicer) which comes with it allows you to compile your stills into a Quicktime movie and then into a DV stream. It also does timelapse and can x2, x3 etc your frames if you don't want to have to do the full 25 (24 film, 30 NTSC etc) frames per second. I recommend any animator to try it - and yes I paid the shareware fee of $40.
I am no expert cameraman but I like tinkering and trying things out. For the travelling shots in
"Will’s new Bike" we simply put one of those small bendy tripods into the bottom of the camera and filmed it upside down. I then used the mirror mode in iMovie to turn it back the right way. Only this did not work perfectly at first. Full eplanation will follow, but is only for those who cannot sleep. Holding the camera upside down as is easy as it like to stay roughly the cirrect angle. Simon and Philip have contemplated making moounts to allow a camaera to be dangled on the end of a broom stick - though the right way up - for this kind of filming.
Last updated 30th September 2008