Creating a Story

When I was a little bit younger, I made a few stop motion animations to practice but I never fully got the hang of it. Since I haven’t made a stop motion for quite some time, for this project, I needed to research inspiration from Pinterest to get the ideas flowing.

Since I never include my face in my work, I wanted to for these products. I set my phone on a tripod and programmed it to go off every few seconds to capture a picture of me doing different poses to create a sequence/story in the stop motion.

For both stop motions, I filmed them in my bathroom to keep the lighting consistent. For the first stop motion, I wanted to make it seem like objects for my morning routine appeared in my hand by the work of magic. Since I used the timeline aspect of Photoshop for the first project on gifs, I was already familiarized with the process and how I was going to create my stop motion.

I opened all of the photos for the project into Photoshop and adjusted their ordered for it to make sense. I opened the timeline window on the bottom of the program and made each layer visible on a different frame to simulate the objects appearing out of nowhere. I made each frame last about 0.3 seconds to make it a little bit faster.

Unfortunately, I had to make a few changes to what I thought was the finished stop motion to make it look presentable. I deleted a few frames to make it more web-friendly and because a few of my classmates thought it would flow better with fewer photos.

In the end, I exported the stop motion for web legacy and turned it into a gif. This was what ended up being my final attempt for this specific project. For the second stop motion, I wanted to experiment with changing lipstick colors by touching my lips and a new shade appearing on my lips instantly.

So again, I set my phone up on a stable surface and programmed it to take a picture every few seconds. I opened all of the photos for the project into Photoshop and adjusted their ordered for it to make sense. I opened the timeline window on the bottom of the program and made each layer visible on a different frame to simulate the lipstick colors instantly changing on my lips.

I made each frame last about 0.3 seconds to make it a little bit faster and seamless. In the end, I had to remove a few frames to make it flow better story-wise and picture wise. To finish it off, I exported the second stop motion for web legacy and turned it into a gif. I was surprisingly proud of what I came up with for my stop motions since I never show my face and haven’t made these types of projects in a while. I look forward to perfecting my skills in creating smoother stop motions in the future.