Boy oh boy! This project was definitely a doozy to create! In order to put the whole iMovie video together, I had to take over 6,000 pictures to create the stop motion effect. Preparing for those pictures to be taken is another story.

First, I had to come up with my ideas for what the film would be about. I decided that I wanted something fun and possibly adventurous, so I decided to work with pirates and treasure of course! Next, I worked on creating all of the pieces of the video. I had to create a background, setting, characters, props, etc. Now that everything was prepared, the pictures were ready to be taken. One thing that I thought would be interesting to include was myself. In the video you can see that I incorporated my hands creating the entire story. I use my hand to get the supplies, “paint” the background, and take down the whole set at the end. Looking back on the whole painting and picture taking process, things probably took around 12 hours on and off between two days.

After all of the pictures were done, it was time to put everything together! At first I was having a hard time figuring out how I wanted to put things together. It took a lot of experimentation to figure out how long I wanted each frame to be. My first thought was, “Duh, each frame should be one second! It can be nice and fast to show the whole film. Maybe even a half a second could work!” I realized that I was wrong, one second was way too slow. After a whole lot of experimentation, I found that having each frame set at .2 seconds was the perfect speed for what I wanted. Now was the tedious task of making each frame .2 seconds long! I knew there was a way to make all of them the same length, but unfortunately with just how many pictures I had in the iMovie it did not work and would even crash the software after a few seconds of loading.

I made it though! The editing itself took a few hours due to how tedious it was to set each picture to the same amount of time. But overall I had so much fun creating this project! I would love to create another stop motion film in the future.