How Animate Using Digital Blue

How animate using Digital Blue:

Many schools have Digital Blue cameras and software and these can be used for creating stop-frame animations. Many of the tips and tricks in the section on using Xipster apply to this software too but there are also a few other things to remember.

1. From the Live Screen select the Stop-motion animation button – this will bring up the palette to the left.

2. Position your figure(s) and, using your mouse, click the ‘Capture a frame’ icon.

3. Now move your figures (a very little bit) and click the icon again and so on.

4. Remember that 15 frames creates just 1 second of animation so to make a 30-second film you will need to shoot 450 images.

5. If you make a mistake remember that you can only delete the last image. So it is really important to remember to keep hands out of the shot.

6. When you have completed your animation click the red ‘Finish Stop- Motion’ icon.

7. Preview your animation by clicking on the Play button at the bottom of the screen.

8. Don’t worry about using sound effects or other effects at this stage – they are added later in the same way as they would be for making any other film in Digital Blue.

9. Remember that you can move the story along by using text – you do not have to animate every bit of the story – you can use text on the screen (the same as making a title) to tell part of the tale, especially if some bits are too hard to animate. After all, this as how they used to tell the story in ‘silent’ films before it was possible to add sound to movies.