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How to Make Stick Figure Animation Movies

With a little bit of inventiveness, stick figure animation movies can be just as engrossing and compelling as the high-priced Pixar productions like "Up!" and "Toy Story." Like any movie, the most important thing is story, not production value. You should go through as many drafts as possible to come up with a story that will give your animation emotional and narrative weight.

Things You'll Need

  • Paper
  • Pen
  • Camera
  • Computer
  • Editing software
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Instructions

    • 1

      Draw a frame of your movie. Convey all the details you need in this early frame, such as gender, location, and other aspects.

    • 2

      Draw the subsequent frames on separate sheets of paper. Each frame should stay within the artistic principles you've set, keeping characters consistent and location details consistent. Keep the proportion of characters consistent as well.

    • 3

      Focus a camera on the image. Decide on how you wish to transition between frames. You can either "flip" the book or set up each frame and record each frame individually. For the "flip" method, you will record continuously, and the frames will need to be in reverse order. You then pick up the pages and let them fall at a rapid pace. By the other method, you record the movie in the style of stop-motion animation, recording each frame and then editing them together into a coherent method.

    • 4

      Record voice-overs, if you choose to use them. Voice-overs can provide emotional weight to your cartoon and help create a vibrancy to the cartoon. Alternately, you can try subtitles or word balloons.

    • 5

      Edit the movie together in an editing program. Make sure the voice-overs, frames, and visual style all cohere into an engaging narrative.

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