Creative Business Archives

How to create a stop motion for Instagram

May 24, 2018June 12, 2018

Have you seen a stop motion on Instagram or elsewhere and thought you would like to have a go? Or wondered how they are made? I have made a few lately. Whilst I am still learning I thought I would share all I know so far.

If you are new to the world of stop motions then effectively they are a mini movie made up of still photos. The ‘movement’ of the items in the movie is made manually by yourself in increments and a photo is taken at each stage. They work much like a flip book you may have had as a child. A stop motion is a great way to make items move that wouldn’t normally move and visually represent something in a way that will delight or surprise others.

To make the stop motions below I used my iphone 6, a small grip tripod on a larger camera tripod, and a bluetooth remote. I had a white back drop which is a piece of shelving placed on a table. Props such as flowers, pencils, pencil case, notebook.

The apps I used were Photoshop (not essential) and iMovie on my Mac laptop. There are apps on your phone which you can use but I haven’t used any yet.

I have written this guide to share how to make the simplest and shortest stop motions. The one’s I have made are no longer than 14 seconds.

How to make a stop motion

Concept first

Before starting it is a good idea to come up with a creative idea and maybe storyboard or plan what you are going to make. For the three below I wanted to convey the idea of creating beauty with words so I thought about how to visually represent that. Hence, pencils for the action of writing words and flowers for the beauty created.

Then I needed to think what I wanted them to do. For one stop motion I thought that I would like the pencils to dance a bit and then shoot out the flowers and the flowers to dance. In another I wanted the pen to write something so it made a number with petals. Then in another stop motion I wanted the flowers to appear in a notebook as if from a pencil and then for them to dance.

Here are some stop motions I have made:

Weekends are for playing. This one is for the writers who create beauty. . . #hopewriters #bloomandgrowtogether #dayofsmallthings #awakethelight #tinytinymoments #simplepleasures #abmlifeisbeautiful #beautyinthemundane #flowersofig #lovelysquares #dayslikethese #graceupongrace #stopmotion #WHPoddlysatisfying

A post shared by Abi Partridge (@abipartridge) on Apr 28, 2018 at 1:36pm PDT

There’s so much information out there on writing and publishing it’s hard to know where to start and who to trust. . There is a process and it doesn’t have to feel like a mystery. . From a blog post to an article, to a book, publishing is about sharing your work. . You are already on the writing path! . The hope*writers have created a short fun quiz to discover where you are in the writing path and how to move forward. . Access the quiz via link in my profile. You’ll discover your stage in writing process and tips to get you to the next stage! . 🎼bensound.com

A post shared by Abi Partridge (@abipartridge) on May 15, 2018 at 4:07am PDT

This is your one week left to submit warning! See iolamagazine.com/submit for more details on having your writing published in iola magazine this September. . 🎼bensound.com

A post shared by iola (@iolamagazine) on May 8, 2018 at 3:10am PDT

Set up

It is really important that you set up your camera on a tripod so that all your photos are of the same area. I used a camera tripod and as I was using my phone and don’t have an adapter for the larger tripod, I used the mini grip phone tripod to grip around the tripod. You will need to face the camera/phone as face down as you can get it. Here’s my set up in front of a window but not on a bright sunny day – despite the paddling pool in the background!

Photos

Then I took a series of photos moving items a small amount each time. I use a Bluetooth camera remote so I don’t have to touch the phone and risk jogging it. It also makes the process quicker. You can use apple headphones as a shutter release. For example here is a series of the first few shots of the ‘How’ movie. There were 42 stills in the movie in total. (If you are looking for a letter board like mine, here is a link.)

I edited the photos in Photoshop by brightening them (recording the action and batch processing so that it is consistent across the whole movie) but if you have good enough photos, that are lit well then you may not need to do this.

Making the stop motion in iMovie

Here is a mini movie of making the movie!

Make a new movie with no theme, add media – your photos to project media. (my photos are all square because I want a square movie for instagram)

Select all and drag to your movie time line window.

Make sure all the stills are selected and go to the crop button and select fit.

Make sure all the stills are selected and you want to change the duration to something between 0.2 -0.6 seconds.

Press play and watch your movie!

You may notice the flow isn’t quite right (or like I did, a rogue hand is in one of my stills), so you can go back and delete or add more stills or add stills again to repeat a section. You can also add music if you want to, but this is just a basic guide.

Share on Instagram

To share the movie on Instagram, I put the finished movie file into my Dropbox which I can then access on my phone to share on instagram.

This post contains affiliate links.

What is the point of creativity?

May 3, 2018May 31, 2018

What is the point of creativity? Maybe you’ve started out on a creative endeavour. You’ve started to create something you love, and there’s been some momentum. You’ve had some encouragement, you’ve started to dream about where this could go. Bravely you’ve taken steps forward. But then…

All the doubts, the desire for something bigger has taken over. The pressure, the questions, the constant creative circle of create – share – dream – doubt. I know this because I too have been there. Actually, I’m here more often than I am not. I too am in that circle of creating and sharing and I want to encourage you and show up for you and say we are in this together, I am figuring this out too.

In this connected world, there is a lot of noise and challenge for the creative, whilst it’s great; we can share, get feedback, celebrate other’s wins, grow something, connect more widely, it brings with it all the things comparison stirs in us. The beauty of our creativity is that there is so much of it, we are surrounded by people coming fully alive to the creative being they are designed to be and it’s amazing, people are amazing…. and yet…. We look around and then we look at ourselves and pause. I don’t think there is anyone who doesn’t do this. Even that person you think is grounded and talented and has a large audience, they still suffer the same comparison syndrome, they still have to question their motive of why they create.

We ask, what is the point? What do I have to add? What have I achieved? These are tough questions to answer. But may I gently suggest that they are the wrong questions.

Perhaps, you and I, we need to ask, WHY? What if we start at the beginning and ask why? Why do I create? May I suggest some answers that you may think answer why you create, and yet can serve to send you off down a distorted path?

Do you create because you want attention?

Is it because you want attention? Ouch, I’ve felt the warmth of approval of the number of hearts on an Instagram photo. I know. This can not be my why. This is not why I create, because I know I am fickle, and well, if I am fickle, aren’t we all fickle? Attention or fame is not what it is made out to be. How many likes or hearts will satisfy my desire for attention? Is this the reason I create? Pretty soon, the heart of my creativity will die. I will lose myself to creating for the masses. If I create only to capture others likes I will lose my own heart eventually. I will not know what makes me come alive. This is the tension, we want to sustain our creativity, we want to share, we want numbers because we think it means more freedom, but it is a trap. If we can’t stay authentic and true something inside our soul will die.

“The human soul was not made for fame” Al Andrews

Do you create because you want to earn money from it?

I know this, as someone who has worked in the creative industry for over a decade, this will not truly satisfy your creative soul. Most of us need to earn a living and if we can do it by being creative that is a good thing. But believe me when I say soon you will have doubts, don’t think that you won’t have to deal with everything else involved in creating a business. Soon you will start to question am I just creating for the money? Am I losing my creative soul as I create for whoever is paying the bill? There will be more questions and doubts and struggles and ideas of selling out and worth and value and compromise. It will take hard work and many things you may not want to do to satisfy the brief and bring in the income. It can’t be the only reason we create.

Perhaps there is a better “why”

May I suggest that there is a solution to this. This is how I deal with the doubt and the vulnerability hangovers. Asking yourself, reminding yourself of this one question will bring you back to the start. This will be the best, most authentic, one question that will keep you grounded. It will keep you connected to your soul. Your “why you create” could be because you love it and you can’t not create. Because you come alive sensing the joy in your soul knowing that this life-living is the point. This is what you were made to do, this is where you feel most alive, this is what truly satisfies your soul, to notice the beauty, to see the good, to create because this. is. who. you. are. If we start here we can not lose. No one can take this from you. No one can give attention or pay you to do this that will make it worth any more to you.

This is the place of authentic creativity.

You are made in the image of the Creator, and in your imaging of him, you create. This is worthy of God, this is your worth-ship. Following the inner call of your soul, that he placed in you, to create beauty and truth. Your creativity is a gift to God and to the world. Holding in outstretched palms your offering with the statement; look what I made. Look what God made me create. This offering has something of God in it. Look at what it tells you, draws you to, reveals in its beauty, in its life.

“Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on behalf of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat ud of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.” Steven Pressfield, ‘The War of Art’

The other questions are secondary and if you are called down those other paths you will figure it out one small step, a day at a time. But if you daily start from here, from this place of: “because I am creative” and forget the secondary questions, your soul can breathe. In the end, it is your soul that lasts. All the other things will fade away.

For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world (attention, money, power) but loses his soul?

For when you wonder, what do I do with…

January 18, 2018January 18, 2018

What do I do with my life? It is not always a one time question, I find myself asking it often at junctures. Here’s a story of how I came to do my next right thing*.

Is there something that you did as a child all the time? Something that you loved to do, dream about, put all your creativity into, but slowly over time, you grew up and some of those first dreams started to disappear? Maybe as you got older, studied, found jobs, hints of those creative forays and long ago dreams appeared as glimpses in your work. As you found small ways to express yourself in the areas that made you feel most alive, you seemed to bloom, the skies were blue and everything seemed right with the world. Other times you felt yourself slowly disappear into the mundane, the day-to-day and nothing seemed to hold any purpose. Those long ago dreams in childhood seemed like foolish fantasies.

When I was a child

Once, I was a child and I had a best friend and my brother’s best friend was her brother and we would badger our parents to drive us to each others houses on Saturday mornings. My friend Jayne and I would make fimo badges and play with Sindys. When we were at our house we used to think it was cool to clamber up a ladder into the loft where all kinds of things were stored and we made it into a den. Alongside the old moses basket and my parents holiday club items stored in a nappy changing tub, we even snuck up there for a midnight feast once, safe in the knowledge that my parents were fast asleep, knowing nothing of it. Of course they did but they let us think we were just like the Secret seven or Famous five. At one point, being maybe the bossy one, I decided to call us the Sunvale sunshines, Sunvale being the name of the road my brother and I lived on. I decided that what our club needed was a club magazine. I dutifully made a magazine, asked my friends for their contributions, for which I think my friend gave me some jokes for, the boys I don’t remember being overly productive. But I stuck pages from other magazines, attempted to draw cartoons, wrote down short stories and stapled them together. Of course there was only one copy, so we had to share it and probably no one actually read it except me, but I loved putting it together.

The teenage years

Scroll on some years and those same sunvale sunshines were teenagers and went to our church’s youth group on Friday nights, hanging out downstairs at the church. Painted on one wall was a huge bus breaking through, just by the covered baptism tank in the floor. There were tables with benches attached, that must have come from an old Mcdonalds, a snooker table and soft drinks and sweets sold from behind a bar. It was called ‘the alternative bus shelter’. Sometimes bands would come and play and we thought it was kind of, you know, sort of alright, in our teenage way. But it was missing something of course. A magazine. A few of us that decided to put together our own little magazine, I’m not even sure what was in it but I do remember writing something on fashion and doctoring a photo of our pastor to make his seventies flares look even bigger. This was in the days before desktop design programmes, so I learnt the ever-so important skill of tearing paper at the edges and placing it on another sheet to photocopy so you wouldn’t see hard edges of that text box on the photocopy. That was how we designed and laid it out, the photocopier was our printer.

What do I do with my life?

Back then my dream was to work in ‘the media’. My Aunt worked for a media company in London and arranged for work experience at magazines, I remember being taken to wine bars and told I had to work hard, visiting whats on tv mag and talking to the picture researcher. At this point I thought that maybe ‘media’ wasn’t for me and narrowly missed getting a now much denigrated ‘media studies’ degree by studying English and Publishing instead. At this point I think I thought books were more respectable and studying Emma for exams at school made me think perhaps I’d be the next Jane Austen? I don’t know, but the persuasive course head convinced me that a high proportion of graduates went on to get jobs in publishing after their degrees, so that swung it.

Studying

The course was interesting, I loved books and to be studying in Oxford (at Brookes not that University I hasten to point out) was something I never really appreciated as much as I probably should have. I was young, perhaps impulsive, definitely naive but with my whole life laid out before me. For part of my final project for publishing, we could create our own project and by now you know what I chose to do, I designed a magazine. My boyfriend at the time (now my husband) was doing a gap year with a missions organisation and I decided to put together a magazine for them using my newly learnt typography and Quark design skills. The cover was a train wreck, I had it printed at a real printers and everything, I’m not sure where it is otherwise I’d show you. But we all start somewhere.

Working

I spent the next part of my working life, being a designer first with books, and psychometric tests, then leaflets, then logos, booklets, brands, then children, then events, posters, craft kits, blogs, social media, books, graphics, and now magazine ads. But something was missing.

Dreaming

That dream I mentioned way back in the first paragraph, was of magazines, working in them, creating them. When I have felt my most stuck, magazines and a cup of coffee at a coffee shop have been my idea of self-care. Magazines are my guilty pleasure, a refuge, an inspiration. I wanted to create a magazine. It may sound silly and small, and I’m not by any means pretending that this new project is the next Vogue, I’ve hesitated to even commit to more than one issue. But this is where I have been drawn to lately. Sometimes the clues are there like breadcrumbs through life as to what the next right thing* is.

Hope*writers

Nearly two years ago, I joined an online community called hopewriters, run by Emily P Freeman, Brian Dixon, Myquillyn Smith and Gary Morland. As a long time reader of The nesting place, Myquillyn’s blog, I came to hear about it through her posts. Hopewriters offered me the opportunity to join others learning about writing books, getting published and how to market without it feeling icky. This tribe has been so encouraging and I have met people who are working out their own paths of writing, creating online and publishing books. In 2016 I flew to Charlotte in North Carolina to meet some of these writers in real life at a workshop, never before have I felt as at home amongst colleagues who get this weird writing online world.

Colleagues

Last year I self-published a creative tutorial/devotional book and it gave me an idea. Working alone at home I missed working as a team on something. I knew that I had the design skills to be able to put something pretty together, so I asked my hopewriter friends if they were interested in contributing to this little magazine idea that I had. I was overwhelmed with the response, these amazing writers and artists who are all carving their way in offering hope and beauty to their own readers, decided to offer some of that to this little magazine idea. Knowing we are stronger together and can reach more people together than on our own, we’ve gathered together this collection of stories, playlists, articles, art, words, photos, to offer out to all our readers in order that they might be blessed, encouraged, inspired, find their own slot of time for self-care with a magazine and a coffee.

I don’t like to use the word should, but this time it is warranted, you really should read iola because you will love reading these women’s words. It is not hard to promote something that I know will bless you. Maybe it will even encourage you to chase down your childhood dreams and help you to consider ‘what do I do with my life?’

Find out more about iola and what’s inside here.

*totally helped by Emily P Freeman’s the next right thing podcast