Stop motion training

We participated on a Stop Motion training on the 7th and 8th of May organized by PICURT in Ártedo.

The training was about how to make a movie with using only photos taken by photo camera. When we arrived, Cinta greeted me with the following: „Never mind that you don’t speak our languages, our training is for everyone.” And really for everyone. There was a family with the grandchild (at the age of about seven) and with the grandmother:). Maybe it’s common here, but not in my country, so this was a nice surprise for me.

On the morning we could learn about stop motion movies in theory. Than we started to plan our own movie. As for me, it wasn’t so easy because of the language difficulties. But of course I realized later, that it’s easier then I thought.

First of all, you need an idea. In my opinion it’s the most difficult part of the process. If you’ve got the idea, you need to find or do yourself all of the parts of your movie.

First we took a picture about the a landscape. And than we drew that to use as a background.

We wanted a landscape with buildings, vehicles, factories, rubbish with all the disturbing thing that are caused by civilization (and later the disturbing things disappeared). We moved these, so the landscape could be animated. First we drew the background, than we looked for the objects that we used. After we had found all the small pictures in magazines, we cut them. When we had finished the preparation, we started to take pictures. Our background laid on the floor, and we moved the small pictures.

When we’ve finished, we used Windows Movie Maker (it’s the easiest, but I think it’s possible with all the editing programs e.g. with on of the Adobe Premieres). So if you had got all the pictures, you don’t really have to edit them, because they are in the right sequence. You just have to delete, if there’re some wrong pictures. Finally you can choose some music to your movie, and the very last thing that you have to do is to save your project:)

We worked for two days on different parts of the days. So unfortunately some of the pictures were darker then the others. To solve these kind of problems, you can use e.g. Photoshop to equalize the differences.

I offer this activity to everyone, who has a photo camera, creativity and some free time. It’s easy, entertaining and fun for the whole family:) .