How Do You Use Locomotion?

Setup your camera and hit record. Move your scene and characters around just like you would with a normal stop motion movie. Make little movements and remove yourself out of the frame.

Then take that movie and upload it to the Locomotion app. That's it!

Tips

TEST!

Nothing's worse than taking a ton of video footage you realize you can't use later on. So make sure to give Locomotion a quick test first. Test the environment you're doing this with to make sure it's optimal (see below: shadows, getting out of frame, etc.)

Avoid Camera Shake

Locomotion can work great with handheld cameras, like an iPhone, but, the more still the camera the better. So if Locomotion is having trouble with your video, you might have more success with a camera on a tripod (or at the very least resting against a book).

Get Out Of The Frame

You still need to get your hands or body out of the frame of the camera while you're animating your scene. If you screwed up and you find parts of your body at the edge of your video, there's still hope! Use something like iMovie to crop your video slightly so that the crop takes out any of your body parts. Now, run the cropped video through Locomotion.

Watch For Shadows

Be careful with your lighting and shadows. When you're setting up your scene and camera, watch how your lighting is making shadows. You don't want a bunch of moving shadows while you're out of frame.

Have Space

Locomotion is a hard drive hog. It needs a lot of hard drive space to do it's thing. For a 1 minute, 1080p video at 24 frames a second, we might use about 9GB of hard drive space! We don't take the responsibility lightly though. After processing, Locomotion will cleanup after itself and remove all that temporary space. (Easy workaround is to just split your clips and process the pieces and then merge them together after.)

Email Nate!

If you have any trouble at all, don't hesitate to reach out. I'm at nate@ninjasandrobots.com. Feel free to send your video over and I'll do everything I can to get things working.