Animate your world in stop motion using your digital camera.
Using action figures to make a movie is a fun, inventive and relatively simple concept. Stop-motion animation is the method used by film-makers to bring inanimate objects to life. With a digital camera and basic video-editing software on your computer, you can turn any object into a character in your movie. Windows Movie Maker is the standard program for Windows users and a great option for the beginner film producer.
Instructions
1. Place your action figures in their starting positions. Fix your camera in place with your preferred method and take a photograph of them.
2. Move your action figures slightly and take another photograph of them. Each frame of the movie will be a photo of a slightly new position of your action figures. When a series of such photos are run together quickly, the incremental changes in their positions will look like movement. Remember to make each movement consistent in spacing and direction with the previous one so that the next frame won't show a jerky movement from the previous frame.
3. Take photos of all the action figure positions you wish to play out your movie and save them onto the hard drive of your computer.
4. Open Windows Movie Maker on your computer from the "Start" menu by clicking "All Programs," locating the program in this list and clicking it.
5. Import the photos to a file in Moviemaker. Go to "Edit" in the tool bar and click "Select all". With the photos selected, drag them all at once onto the "time line" provided by the program. Organize the time line so that the animation plays the photos in the order you desire. You can also drag and drop the photos individually in the order you prefer, this step can just save time if your Collection is immense.
6. Adjust the playing time for each photo by clicking "Tools", then "Options", and setting the picture duration as low as it can go. Repeat this step for each photo.
7. Animate a five to ten second chunk of your movie at a time and save it as a separate clip to avoid slowing the performance of Movie Maker. Longer movie files will cause the program to lag significantly.
8. Combine the smaller clips that you've just animated by saving them all in a separate folder named "My Movie." Open a new project window in Movie Maker and under the Task plane menu to the left, select "Import Video." Find your folder, select your movie files to import and click the "Import" button. The clips are now saved in your "Collection" in Movie Maker.
9. Drag and drop the clips from the Collection to the time line in the order of your design. Now the shorter animated clips that you've just created can play in sequence like a movie.
Add Audio and Title to Your Movie
10. Choose the music for you movie and save it as a compatible format for Windows Media Player. Common formats that work well are Wave (.wav), mp3 (.mp3) and Windows Media Audio (.wma).
11. Click the "Import Audio or Music" tab in the task pane menu. Select the audio file and click Import.
12. Drag the audio file from your Collection to the time line. From here, you can use the mouse cursor to manipulate the length and position of the file in the movie.
13. Right-click the file in the time line for additional effects such as "Fade-In" or "Fade-Out," "Mute" or "Volume."
14. Create a title for your movie. Click on "Make Titles and Credits" in the task plane menu, choose your title location in the beginning of the movie and type your title into the text box provided. You can get creative with the title music and animation in the Make Titles and Credits section.
