Stop-frame animation

Time it takes: 120 minutes

Before processing power was abundant, stop-frame animation was the preserve of the professional. You needed some serious equipment and the enough patience to set each shot up, make a small change to your scene, take the photograph and move on to the next shot. Only then could you develop your frames and construct your animation. Computers remove most of the tedium, and turn what might have been hard labour into a few hours of fun.

Create the art

There are several ways to generate the images you'll use to construct an animation. One of the easiest is to use a digital camera to take photographs of your scene. This is great if you wanted to animate plasticine models, for example. Alternatively, stick purely to Gimp and create each frame manually using its drawing tools.

If you're importing images from a digital camera or a scanner, the trick is to make sure that each image is placed on a different layer within the same Gimp project. You can do this by opening the first frame of your animation, then selecting 'Open As Layers' from the File menu and Shift-selecting all the other image files in your animation. Each frame will then be listed in the layers panel on the right, and you should save your project as a native XCF document before you make any further changes. You can't flick through the animation at this stage, but you can use layer opacity to make sure the subject in each image is aligned. If there are any problems, Gimp has dozens of editing and filter functions that can help pull the quality of your animation up a notch.

Draw it yourself

For our manual approach, we selected the brush tool with a white background and a black paint colour, created a blank canvas at a resolution of 800x600 and started to draw, creating a new layer for each frame. We found it easier to see successive changes if each new layer had a transparent background, as this allowed us to see the previous frames. If you do this, you'll need to right-click on each layer and select Remove Alpha Channel before rendering the final animation. On your first attempt, we'd recommend keeping things simple. We drew a ball falling on to a single-lined trampoline, and the complete animation was 20 frames.

Export

Whether you drew the frames yourself or imported images from your camera, you can export a working animation from Gimp using the animated GIF format. Choose File > Save As from the menu and make sure the format you choose is GIF. Gimp will inform you that the project needs to be exported before it can be saved, and you should choose Save As Animation and then click on Export. This will create a GIF file on your system, and you can view your animation for the first time by right-clicking on this and opening it with Firefox. If you find the GIF format too restrictive, you can use a tool such as MEncoder to convert your animation to something you can share with other people.

Step by step: Animate your doodles

1. If you're using digital camera images, open the first in the animation and then use Open As Layers to load the rest.

2. When drawing each frame, create the layers with transparency and remove the alpha channel before saving.

3. Save the image as a GIF file and Gimp will ask you whether you'd like to create an animation from the file. Yes you do!