Let me introduce you to raffa, an italian music and art teacher and active member of the Cinelerra and Lumiera communities. She uses Cinelerra at school for months now making nice projects with her pupils. “PESCI” is one of these projects. They even got a prize for it.
Find a brilliant idea.
Make sketches as your storyboard.
Stop-motion is a simple way to make good quality movies with low budget. You’ll see.
Go in the wild with your camera to take some photos.
Decompose all movements you want to show with several photos. Each photo is called a frame. Stop-motion is an animation technique.
Awesome! Isn’t it?
When your pictures are all in the box just put them in a folder somewhere in your computer.
If it’s not the case already, the frames should be renamed in a chronological basis. Something like frame0001.jpg, frame0002.jpg … frame0003.jpg etc etc.
Load the pictures into Cinelerra.
We could load all files like we did in the previous tutorials (Files -> Load files -> insertion strategy) but for this exercise we will use another solution:
- Download and install this piece of software ==> seven-gnomes (link)
- Just drop the folder containing your frames in the first tab of the software.
- A .toc file appear in your folder. It contains a list of all the frames and the framerate they should be displayed. This .toc file can be edited with a simple text editor.
- Now you can load the .toc thing into Cinelerra like a normal video file.
Note that you can use other tools to make the image list ==> image lists tools
For example raffa chose Img2list ==> raffa’s howto page.
Look: Frames loaded as a list appear like a normal video file on the timeline.
Play the whole thing to see your animation. It works? I’m proud of you.
Add some effects, a sound track.
You can also edit the frames in your favorite bitmap manipulating program to add virtual object to your movie but that is another story.
Other stop-motion animations made with cinelerra:
– check raffa’s vimeo page.
– Linda and Tim’s wedding made by Shannon Smith.