Introduction

Stop motion animation uses digital images to create an animation in Photoshop. For this tutorial I will be using post-its to design an animation in a home environment. However, you can use this tutorial to help you create a stop motion animation with any post it animation idea, environment or objects.

Objectives covered in this tutorial will allow you to be able to;

Shoot your animation
Download your photos
Animate your photos
Render your video
Share your video

1. Shoot Your Animation

To shoot your animation, you will need;

A work area or environment you can set up and easily come back too.
A digital camera
A tripod

Using a digital camera on a tripod will allow you to take a steady photo.

After taking the first photo of your object, slightly move your object around the work area (this will make it appear as though your object is moving). Move the object again and take the next photo and repeat this action until the object has moved to where you want it to go. If you make a mistake while shooting you can simply delete the image and take another. This saves you from having to edit your images later.

2. Download Your Photos

After taking your photos you now have to get them onto your computer. Simply connect your camera to your computer and transfer the images into a file with a suitable name.

Your images should already be numbered by your digital camera. You shouldn't have to rename or order the photos yourself. It is very important that your sequence of images is correctly numbered.

If an image has been deleted after being taken off the camera you may find you have blank patches when you put your animation together. If you need too, follow this tutorial in Adobe Bridge to rename your photos and ensure this doesn't happen.

Rename your images in Adobe Bridge Video Tutorial

3. Animate Your Photos

Now open Photoshop.

In Photoshop click File àopen à now locate the folder you saved your images. Select the top image in the sequence and tick the “Image Sequence” checkbox.

Click open.

Now you get the option to change the frame rate of your animation; you can set the frame rate to as many frames per second as you like. I’m going to set mine to 12fps, this frame rate will give you quite a fast moving animation. Click OK.

If your animation window is not already open please select this from the toolbar WindowàAnimation. This will provide you with an animation timeline.

You can now drag you timeline across and see the animation playing.

4. Render Your Video

Before you upload your animation you need to render your video. Go to file àexportà render video.

Name your video something suitable and click select folder to save it in an appropriate location.

Select Settings... from the section ‘File Options’.

This will take you to the ‘Movie Settings’ dialogue box. Here you can select Settings again.

You the need to change the compression type to H.264 and change the video quality to BEST. Once you have done all this you can click OK.

Select OK again for the ‘Movie Settings’ dialogue box and then RENDER.

Animate your image sequence Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorial

The above steps; Animate Your Photos and Render Your Video are also demonstrated in this video tutorial.

5. Share Your Video

Now that your video has been rendered you may want to share it online. If you have a Gmail account, you will already have a YouTube account, you can skip to the YouTube section for instructions on how to upload your video. If you do not have a Gmail/YouTube account, you could consider making a Vimeo account.

Vimeo is a video-centric social networking site much like YouTube. It supports embedding, sharing, video storage, and user commenting. Setting up a Gmail account requires you to enter a phone number; Vimeo does not ask for any personal details.