1. What is an Animated Movie

Examples of animated movies are Singing Dog, Dancing Birds and Singing Dog 2. They are short videos made from repetitive clips put together in a way that an object (a dog or bird in this case) moves like you want it to. Usualy that means moving in an unexpected and unrealistic way and therefore can be a good source of amusement. In Singing Dog a pooch is animated so it look's like it's singing and in Dancing Birds the birds look like they are dancing.

2. Filming - how much footage is enough footage?

When making an animated movie you first need some footage of the desired object. The amount of footage needed to make a 1 minute long animated film is actually very small. You could do with approx 5 min of good material. But in reality you can not always get 5 min of good material, usually you have material that has good and not so good segments. I prefer to make a lot of footage and than decide which parts to use. The bad side of that is much bigger file on your computer and a lot of work to find the right parts. At the end it all depends on the object you are filming. For the Singing Dog and Singing Dog 2 I made approx. 20 min of footage whereas for the Dancing Birds I made a lot more - about 1,5 hours.

3. Transfering Footage to the Editing Program

When you got the amount you think is enough, transfer it to your computer. That can usualy be done via firewire. The next step is to load the filmed material into an editing program. I use Adobe Premiere although for this kind of movie The Windows Movie Maker should be fine.

4. Choosing the Right Music

The right choice of music is crucial to make the movie work. Also, I always make sure that the video is not too long. A movie that is longer than 2 min can become repetitive and boring to the viewers and it also takes a lot more energy to complete. If the music is longer than you wish your movie to be, see if you can trimm it at some point and still make it sound like a finished piece. With most songs that is not a problem, because they are usualy made from two or more repetitions of a theme. If you need too, you can help yourself with decreasing the volume at the end. When you have prepared the music, decide what kind of animation you want.

5. Choosing the type of Animaton

If you have a footage of an animal with a moving mouth you can make it look like it is singing. If it's mouth is not moving you can make it look like it is dancing. For the dancing type of animation you could also use non-living objects, such as cars, trees, etc. For Singing Dog I used our dog and made him do some tricks. The most usable were the parts where it was eating the treats.

6. Animating

The most basic elements of an editing program are used when making this sort of animation. Most important is to have the ear for music and the eye for details. First you check if any part of the footage already fits to the music. That part won't have to be changed. Birds for example can move their heads up and down repeatedly. But in case they don't you can use a little trick.

First select a short segment when which contains the motion you want to multiply. Then copy that segment a few times. The next step is to reverse every other copy - make them run backwards. The animation is then already there, but you have to adjust the speed to fit the music. For basic animation all clips will have the same speed but in more advanced animatons, every clip will have to be adjusted on its own.

7. Exporting the Movie

When finished with animating, the next step is to export the movie. I usually export the raw movie - select .avi when exporting. Then I convert the file to either divx (.avi) or .wma, .mov etc. I prefer divx. If you are using Windows Movie Maker I recommend you export the movie right away as .wma.

8. Examples

Singing Dog		Dancing Birds		Singing Dog 2

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