Synopsis

Easily turn several still images into a video effect in PowerPoint using a stop motion effect. This step-by-step tutorial walks you through creating your first stop motion video in PowerPoint. Source files include the PowerPoint file with pre-built animations, as well as people cut out images. Work along and learn.

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Video Transcript

Hey, hey, this is Bryan Jones from eLearningArt. Today I’m going to show you how to use some stop motion to create a conversation in an e-learning course. I am going to use PowerPoint. I am just going to go ahead and show you the effect.

So I might have these three characters and you can, if they are having a conversation they might… let me keep this going. Right, they might change poses and that’s using kind of a fade effect. You can also do the same thing where it’s like true stop motion where it’s just swapping out the images and that works fine but the fade is kind of a nice effect.

So let me close out of here and I did this in PowerPoint but you can do this in most e-learning authoring tools as well and I will go ahead and give you the source files so you can click on the link on the screen or look in the show notes and you can download the source files and follow along. It will be the PowerPoint files as well as the character images that are in here. So if you think that’s cool please take a second and just like this video. It would mean a lot to me.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

Let me show you first, you know I always like to have the selection in the visibility pane opened to control the different layers and I will do the, oops… animation pane as well. Let’s go ahead and show the animation pane.

Now this one I don’t have the animation set up because this is my working file. Let’s go ahead and start from scratch.

So on the background here, and I’m going to include eight images for you in this file but basically two poses of each and you will notice that I actually went through four different poses and I am going to show you how you can actually manipulate two images into four by just doing a couple little tweaks. Let’s go ahead and insert all of these character images and let’s… let me make this a little bit smaller. Okay.

So it’s really going to help if you can name these characters the way you want. I know these two characters I am going to want to face the other direction so let’s just go ahead and flip them horizontal for now and I will worry about the alignment and everything later. But let’s get them separated a little bit.

So it’s really helpful to be naming these characters in a way that’s going to be useful for you. So I am going to do a sequence where I am basically going to have all three of them listening so you can see what I’ve done here. Then the guy on the left is going to talk and everyone else is going to listen. Then the woman on the right is going to talk and then she is going to do… the woman on the right is going to do a second talking pose. So let’s go ahead and create that kind of set up.

If I am naming these guys I am going to say this guy is going to be left-listen and I know this is going to be the first pose I want to do so let’s just put a “1” in there. And this is going to be the second pose that he’s in so I’m going to say second pose, left character talk. I am going to call this the first pose.

The center character is going to be forward and then the second pose of her, the center she’s going to be facing the left, right? Because he’s going to be talking in that second pose. And now this is listening post so her first pose facing… well she’s going to be listening 1-R listen and now we are going to do… in the second one she is also listening.

So actually what I am going to do now is am going to duplicate her so Ctrl+D and we are going to say her second pose is going to be 2 R listen and then her third pose is actually going to be 3 R talk and then we are going to go ahead and duplicate her, Ctrl+D and that’s going to be 4 R talk. Whatever, I could say talk 2 if I wanted to.

Alright so now my left character in the third pose is going to be listening, listening. So let’s go ahead and take this and we are going to duplicate his listening pose and we are going to call that 3 L listen and he is going to listen again so let’s duplicate that and do 4 L listen.

Okay and now in the center character in the third pose the right person is talking so we are going to duplicate it and I’m actually going to flip that horizontal so she is facing the other direction and her third pose is going to be 3-center facing the right and her fourth pose is going to be the same thing.

Now you don’t have to be duplicating the character but what I am going to do is actually manipulate a couple of things where I make that same image look like a new one by moving her a little bit — so 4-center-right.

Okay so now I basically have the sequence of all of these and I kind of like to group these by character just so that I am able to follow them. So all my left characters… let’s go ahead and move them down. So now they are all grouped together and my right characters… let’s go ahead and move that one up. And then my center character these are all together. Now they are just in the right order.

This makes it a little easier and also in PowerPoint a little trick is you can actually change picture so if I did like a right-click change picture even if I have all these animations built in I don’t lose that animation so it’s one of the cool things about setting up the files this way in PowerPoint.

Okay so now it’s time to go ahead and add the animations and you will see why the naming of the characters is really going to help us out. So essentially we are going to be wanting to fade out certain poses and fade in other poses. So let’s go ahead and we don’t need the first pose to appear because that’s going to be on the screen as the first shot. So let’s go ahead.

I am going to shift click each of the second poses and then add animation and I’m going to make it a fade appear – great. Now I’m going to do the third poses again shift clicking and I am going to add animation, fade and now I’m going to do the fourth poses – shift clicking and I’m going to go ahead and add that.

Now the problem with what we just created is that they are going to be stacking on top of each other and I’m going to show you what the problem is going to be. So that first pose is fine but right but it’s just going to be building and that’s really not to the effect we are trying to create so we need to add a fade outs. So let’s go ahead and do that.

And I’m going to add this election to this bullet pane again and so now we need the first pose to be disappearing for each so let’s go ahead and do that and we will add an animation and we are going to fade out and then second pose, shift clicking, add animation, fade out and third for all three here – add animation exit fade out.

But now we don’t need to fade out the fourth one because it’s going to be the one that ends on the screen and that’s fine. Now we need to match these up.

So when the… let’s go ahead and the first pose needs to… so I had to shift click to grab all three. The first pose is going to disappear as the second pose is appearing.

So let’s go ahead and drag that up and now we are going to change this to start with previous and now it’s all one group. So first one disappears as the second one appears and the second one I am shift clicking, dragging these up and then we are going to start with previous and then the third one disappears as the fourth one appears so let’s go ahead and start with previous.Actually let’s click on all of them, let’s start with previous – okay.

So that should give the effect that we are looking for so let’s go ahead and preview this. Great so now some weird things are happening alright. We need the characters to actually be where they are supposed to be so let’s go ahead and mess with the alignment here.

All right so let’s go ahead and move the character’s roughly where we want. And you know I am not going to spend as much time as I normally would getting it perfectly aligned but this should be enough to kind of show you the general effect.

And okay so let’s take a quick look. Actually I’d like to move her down a little. I will just actually grab them all there by mouse over. Let’s get a quick look at that effect.

Okay great. So now you’re wondering, you also saw a couple of those fades that just faded the same image on top of each other. What I was trying to do with that fourth one… so let’s see, fourth one to the right, you want to make it a little bit different.

So let’s do a slight lean in, just a little bit and then let’s move it a little bit over there and the same thing, this guy in his fourth pose, he is listening. He was also doing that on the third one so let’s go ahead and have him lean in slightly and move him a little bit just to make that subtle.

Are there any other ones with the same pose? It’s basically between the third and fourth poses so I think I’ve fixed those enough.

Oh, you know her talking is the same thing. Now she is going to lean in on this pose and I will move it a little bit over there. Now let’s see how we kind of multiply those two poses in to feel like four. So now and I would probably mess around with that a little bit I think I leaned… I made it a little too dramatic with the lean in but you can make that more subtle by just not rotating the image is quite as much.

Okay so I hope you found that useful. I do have a bonus download for you that includes these images as well as a bunch of other images so you can click on the link on the screen or you can also check out the show notes. I also have three other videos that I think you would find useful so you will see I have provided the links.

Again, I am providing the links on the screen here that you can check out or you can check that out in the show notes as well. And if you like these YouTube videos, I suggest you also subscribe to the channel and you will get updates anytime I publish a new YouTube video.

So thanks so much. I hope you found this useful and have a great day!