making moving objects look like stop motion

[Gareth Randall]

Try applying the Quantize parameter behaviour to the global position parameter. That can make the motion appear more “steppy”.

[Jason Watson]

I have a few suggestions, listed from fastest to most tedious.

My first suggestion would be to export the project, import the resulting movie and add the Retiming>Strobe effect to it. Set the Strobe duration for the number of frames you want it to stutter before moving on.

My second suggestion is to add a camera every few frames (determine this in advance!) and very slightly shift its position and/or rotation. If you do this for about 15-20 unique cameras, you can then group them, duplicate and reuse. There will be enough randomness to make it seem random all the way through, especially if the modifications are only very slight. You can then export the project, import the movie and add the Strobe effect at a duration that matches the camera changes.

My third suggestion is far more tedious, but would give you much more realistic results, since it is essentially stop-motion animation.

Start by selecting the number of frames per second you want to use. (It significantly helps if your base timecode is divisible by this number!) For example, if your project has a frame rate of 30, you might want to have the motion be 10fps, which means each object has a new state every 3 frames.

If you want to use an already animated object as a guide, that could be useful. I think the easiest way is to duplicate forward: 1. have the first object be in its position, then duplicate it 2. move the duplicated object forward three frames and adjust position/rotation/whatever slightly 3. duplicate that, move forward, adjust, etc.) Having a smoothly animated reference object would probably help here, since you could just match the states at different points in time.

You could also add the camera adjustment from previous suggestion to really sell it, assuming you are going for a non-steady camera look as well. (that is, simulating the look of the camera shutter adding some jitter, etc.)

There may be easier ways to do this that elude me, but I hope that’s helpful. 🙂

[Eyal Shtark]

Thank you guys

I was sure there would be an easy way of doing it, its Apple Motion after all.

I will try your ideas and see how it goes.

Thanks.