Making Animation from Stills

Hi, my name is Jasmine, and I’m 7 years old. Today I made two animated movies, The Basket (1m 18s long) and Snowbell’s Accident (2m 23s long) (Nov 2nd, new with audio!) Enjoy!

I made these by taking still photographs of the action with my dad’s iPhone and then recording an audio soundtrack (for the second animation). My dad then assembled the stills into an animation and layered on the soundtrack (see below for how). I’m working to add music to it — check again soon!

The Basket (1m 18s long) (silent film)
The Pets find a cozy basket. But amidst all the hustle and bustle, will anyone be able to take a nap?

Snowbell’s Accident 2m 23s long)(Nov 2nd, new with audio!)
Snowbell the cat has a terrible accident. Will her family be able to act quickly enough to save her?

Animation (2m 23s long) made from stills assembled into an sequence playing at 1 frame per second.

How-to instructions, for Windows PC, using free software. (written by Jasmine’s daddy)

1. How to make Animations from Stills
Use Total Commander with two free plugins: (1) the Graphic Converter plugin converts the iPhone’s native HEIC images to PNG files, and can compresses the images to reduce data bulk; (2) the AVI plugin (Alt+F5) sequences images at a user selectable speed (frames-per-second 1 to 30) and image compression quality (Full 100% or MS Video 1 @ 75% compression)

2. How to record Audio soundtrack
Use Audacity (download the zip file which is portable). This will allow you to record one or multiple audio tracks, edit them, add effects if desired, and export to an audio file (MP3). (Audacity quickstart.) For good sound quality, it’s worth investing in a good USB headset with microphone (Logitech makes decent ones, even at the lower price points). (Note that Comparable software to Audacity have $30-$50 licenses.) Troubleshooting: If the sound bars jump to yellow/red whenever you’re recording, you likely have sound amplification (e.g. +10dB boost) or other enhancement configured. Fix: turn off such settings from Windows control panel (Control Panel > Sound > Microphone > Recording). Or, you could try the free online voice recorder, but you’ll have less control in the editing studio department than with Audacity.

3. How to merge animation video and audio soundtrack
Download the portable version of FFMPEG video/audio converter. Using this you can merge separate audio and video tracks with the following simple command line script which you putting it in the same location as the audio and video files, and updating the variables of the script to your filenames and directory structure:

@echo off
echo Merge AVI video and MP3 audio with FFMPEG (AE, Nov 2, 2019, v1)
:: configure the below to match your setup
set ffdir=c:\totalcmd\ffmpeg64\bin
set video=snowbells_accident_jasmine_second_take_silent.avi
set audio=snowbells-accident-audio_track4.mp3
pause
:: instruction
%ffdir%\ffmpeg.exe -i %video% -i %audio% -c:v copy -c:a aac -strict experimental output.avi


Note: This should work for FFMPEG versions even as old as from 2012.

(For those who like Total Commander, the AVIWCX plugin looks promising, though FFMPEG will have many more options and be able to input and output many more AV formats.)

4. Concatenating (merging, joining, chaining) video files (works with FFMPEG 4.4.1, not with
Use FFMPG concatenate video function:


@echo off
echo Concatenating selected videos with FFMPEG (AE, Jan 2, 2020 v1)
:: configure the below to match your setup
set ffdir=c:\totalcmd\ffmpeg64\bin
pause
:: instruction
%ffdir%\ffmpeg -y -f concat -i list.txt -vcodec copy -acodec copy merged.MOV


This concatenates files in list.txt, which is formatted as:

# comment
file IMG_2814.MOV
file IMG_2818.MOV
file IMG_2822.MOV
file IMG_2826.MOV


5. Hosting your video on YouTube
Get an account with YouTube. This is the easiest and quickest way to get your video content on the web. No need to deal with storage, download rates, server bandwidth. With the embedding link, you can get the player to appear within your own webpage and play the content.

That’s it! Enjoy!