Stop Motion Movies with iLife

Liam wanted to make a stop-motion animation film. He usually just records on the flip cam and uploads direct to youtube. So we built 4 sets out of lego. If i had been smart i would have build the walls in the shape of a + and put it on a lazy susan so that 4 sets could be easily available.

Anyway, I put the camera on the gorilla pod and he shot a series of scenes for his first TV show called Droid Hospital. I fired up iPhoto and hooked up the camera to import the pictures and then launched iMovie to bring them in. It took a bit of fiddling to get the photos i wanted, the quick and and easy solution was to FLAG the photos and then to set IMovie to look for flagged pictures. I also added two google image shots of a real hospital.

It was no problem putting the images on the timeline. But then we got sidetracked as the director decided he didn't want to do the dialog but to have text bubbles with the comments, like an animate comic book. Well, imovie and iPhoto lack the ability to edit photos that way so we fired up Comic Life which is designed to make comic books or comic book movies.

There was no problem importing the photos from iPhoto and adding the comments in text bubbles but getting the pictures out seemed impossible. The Export function exports a whole page not just the image. I could use grab to capture the picture with text but that seemed a lot of effort. The other option was to bring the photos into iWork and add create a blank presentation slide for each picture. Add the text and the export the slides as a series of images. This works in keynote (and powerpoint too). It's a quick way of churning out a web site banner. In fact, in keynote you can add a transparent gif image to your banner as a logo and it will export out a nice png or jpg banner in any shape with gradients and the transparent logo. (powerpoint does not support transparent images but otherwise works the same). Again, this seemed a lot of work.

We decided to go back to imovie and to add the dialog to the scenes. This is fairly easy to do, you select a clip, click the mic icon, select the clip and it countdowns 3,2,1 and record. You do have to time the dialog so that it lasts only for that scene (each pic is a scene). A couple of takes for some and it was done. Then we added sound effects from the limited iLife sound effects library. It would be nice it there were low cost libraries to add sounds like Garageband jam packs.

Anyway, once the sounds and incidental music was added the movie was rendered down and uploaded to liam's account on youtube.

ToDo:

- Find some soap opera sound effects...cheezy organ riffs etc
- Find soap opera-ish theme music for the opening (The Days of The Week?)
- Get some HALO sounds/music samples for the Covenant set and maybe some Star Wars

I have all these so i could extract them myself but if someone has already done it...