Lights! Camera! Action! Seeing a movie used to mean going to the theater, buying a ticket for a seat, and watching a movie on a huge screen. Making movies used to be something only professionals could do with expensive equipment and years of training. Now, with computers and tablets and smartphones, it’s never been easier for anyone to become a filmmaker and watch movies from anywhere at any time.
Movie-Making Basics
There are four basic steps to making a movie: concept, scripting, shooting, and editing. These steps must happen before a movie can be seen in a theater or on a computer screen. First, you must have a concept. What is your movie about? Is it a fictional story or a true one? Is it a comedy or a drama? Will you need actors? What story are you trying to tell? These questions and more get answered while developing the concept for the movie. Then, you must create a script. Even if your movie doesn’t call for actors reciting lines, you have to work out the story of your piece. It must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Also, part of the scripting process is storyboarding. Storyboarding is where you lay out in a sequence of pictures what the audience will see and hear in the movie. Then, you shoot your movie. Following the storyboard, you get the shots you need. Then comes the editing. Editing is where you put all of the pieces together to produce the final product. After all of the steps have been completed, your movie is ready to be shown to friends and family or maybe even a public audience.
Movie-Editing Software
Movie-editing software is what lets you piece together scenes on a computer to make a whole movie. The software also allows the movie-maker to cut out things they don’t want as well as add special effects like tilting the frame and changing the colors. Once everything is arranged and added, the software can export the movie in different formats for playback.
Stop-Motion Animation
Stop-motion is a type of animation in which you take a picture of something, move it a tiny bit, take another picture, move it again, and so on. When you put all of the pictures together on film, it looks like the object is moving all by itself. The objects used could be dolls with joints that move or clay figures. You can use just about anything, though, as long as you can make it move a little bit at a time.
Stop-motion animation is one of the oldest film-making methods used today. It was first used in 1897 in a film called The Humpty Dumpty Circus. In this movie, toys appear to come to life and perform a circus act.
Animation Software
The animation is the illusion of movement created by a fast-moving sequence of pictures. Animation software is used for many things, such as cartoons, interactive websites, and video games.
