An introduction to iStopMotion for iPad

Let's explore iStopMotion and give you a quick overview of its features. I've launched the application and the first thing I need to do is create a new project. To do that I'll tap the Plus button here at the bottom. A new clip is made. Remember, each clip is essentially one movie and you should think about that as one shot at a time. These final shots are going to be composed of several frames, however. Now, I'll adjust this, and I need to make sure that I choose the right camera. I'll tap the Camera button here, and in this case, select the back camera. It was previously recording the front camera, so you were seeing the ceiling overhead, and that's not a very good shot when we want to record our lion and panda here. Let's just adjust that shot a little bit. Here we go. And move that back just a bit. And I like that composition. Now, I need to take advantage of some of the camera controls. You'll notice that the first thing it prompts you to do after selecting a camera is to adjust the properties. The first choice is Focus. If I tap over here on the lion, the camera quickly adjusts and pulls focus for the lion. On the other hand, the panda's a bit closer, putting the lion slightly out of focus. In this case my subjects are going to move together so, I'll just place my finger here in the center and tap to focus on that. Giving it a nice clear point to easily adjust to. Once Focus is set, go to Exposure. Now, there are two major choices here. The first part is what do you want to expose on. If I set the exposure for something that's white, the scene will sometimes get a bit darker. I tend to expose for something that's in the middle tones. Maybe click on our subject here and you see how the camera makes slight adjustments based on our subject. Now, because we have relatively even lighting, we don't have to worry about this as much. But, what's important is to click the button labeled Continuous and flip that over to Fixed. Continuous adjustments are more useful for things like time lapse animation, where the lighting is changing throughout the scene. But, in the case of Stop Motion, you probably don't want to see a lighting change, unless it's part of your story. Alright, that looks pretty good. The last choice is White Balance. And the White Balance is how the camera calibrates itself. So, by adjusting on different areas of the scene it will attempt to find something that's white. I recommend once the camera looks good to you, you tap the Unlock button flipping it to locked and this will lock it in. At this point the camera shot is pretty good. I'll tap Done, and it's ready to start recording. Now, there's a couple of ways to pull this off you can record by just tapping to the scene or you can use an external remote. Here we are, in our frame, and right now there's nothing actually recorded. If I tap the Record button you see a single shot was recorded down to the timeline. As we continue to move things slightly. Bring this together. I tap and it adjusts. Let's just continue to bring these together. We'll form our own little sitcom meet cute, and get these two characters to meet. We're just doing this nice and quickly. So, you get the idea of how the software works. There we go. And you'll notice the onion skinning feature showing you a preview of the previous frame. Panda continues it's advance. Put a little bit of an angle there, the lion has stopped for a second. There we go. Now the lion comes forward. Do a little charge, and let's bring him all the way together. Record, move, record. Now, along the bottom, you'll notice that all those frames were recorded and we have a miniature timeline. This makes it easy to see things and you can actually preview what's happening. You'll notice that the last shot is ghosted there. And as I step through the animation one frame at a time, I can see those characters advancing towards each other. Pretty simple. And if you want to see that play back, just tap the Playback button, and you've your simple Stop Motion animation. Now, that's the basics of the software. But, there's so much more we could do, particularly if we make our subjects do something a little more interesting. So, up next, we're going to explore some more advanced techniques, as well as, keep the camera from shaking.