D.I.Y.
IMAGING

With iStopMotion software, creating stop motion animations could not get any easier.

STOP MOTION ANIMATION,
THE EASY WAY
With iStopMotion, making Gumby is less pokey.
By Phillip Torrone

Photography by Derrick Story

Stop motion animation, one of the oldest special me thousands of trips back to the keyboard and effects, makes the impossible seem real. But the mouse, and in just a few minutes of experiment-tedious process — move the model, take a picture, ing, I made a fairly impressive little flick. repeat thousands of times — discourages citizen You can even shoot frames simultaneously filmmakers with non-obsessive patience levels. from multiple cameras, to create seamless cuts

I recently discovered iStopMotion, Mac soft- between different angles, just like the pros. ware that automates the process and works For inspiration, go watch King Kong and visit the with any camera that can capture Quick Time. example pages at istopmotion.com/example. I’ll iStopMotion features a transparent preview that post my animation on the media feed of lets you superimpose the previous frame over makezine.com. If you create one, let us know! the current one before you shoot. This alone helps enormously. The Time Lapse feature shoots iStopMotion: free demo version, $39.95 license, frames continuously at a specified interval, and istopmotion.com

Speech Recognition lets you say “Capture” instead of having to click. These two features saved