Make A Very Quick Animation Part 1

Animation happens when you shoot a movie one frame at a time. One of the easiest and most obvious ways to shoot the frames of an animation is with a digital still camera. So I grabbed my Canon S1-is, put it on a tripod, and aimed it at some of the furniture in the classroom of Quickdraw Animation Society . Here's what the shot looks like:

I set the camera to shoot VGA (640 x 480 pixels) images - all the resolution you need for anything up to and including making DVDs. I decided to have one of the classroom chairs enter the shot and pull up to one of the animation tables. I left all of the camera settings on automatic because being too fussy slows things down. The whole point of this exercise was just to DO IT!

Then it was move the chair - take a picture - move the chair - take a picture - and repeat until the chair was where I had decided it would go.

The pictures were now on the camera's memory card, as sequentially numbered JPG images. So it was over to a computer to download them into a folder and check out the motion in the shot. This is what makes digital animation so much fun and so easy - you get to see your animation right away. Both Windows and Mac machines have ways of viewing the frames as a movie immediately.

Click here to check your animation on a Windows PC