At Common Craft, we’ve learned a few things about stop motion video over the years. It’s how we make all of our videos. Yesterday I downloaded the new (and free) Vine app by Twitter, which allows you to capture and share up to 6 seconds of video at a time using an iPhone or iPod Touch.
I noticed that people were using Vine with stop motion effects and I soon discovered how to do it myself. The instructions below cover the basics:
To “record” video in the Vine app, press your finger onto the screen and a green bar at the top shows that it’s recording. You can record a couple of seconds, release your finger to stop, then record something else by pressing again.
Here’s the SECRET to doing stop-motion: You can simply tap the screen to capture a very short bit of video. A tap will cause the green bar to grow by a tiny bit. This is the same as capturing stop-motion photos. Tap - tap - tap.
Here’s how you can create a Common Craft style animation on Vine:
You’ll need to keep the camera phone still while you record - this can be a challenge when you tap the screen. I taped my phone to a cigar box pointed down onto the whiteboard.
Then, it’s a simple matter of moving the object a tiny bit and tapping the app screen to record a tiny bit of video. Move - Tap - Move - Tap - Move - Tap.
Once you finish, you’ll see that the video shows the object animating across the screen. You can see one of my first tries by clicking here:
I'm "leelefever" on Vine. Look me up!
Or, if you're viewing this on an iPhone, click here for my profile.