I’m taking a lovely MOOC on FutureLearn, called Filmmaking and Animation in the Classroom. I’m going to show you how to animate a Scales of Justice using CrazyTalk Animator 3. Although I’ve chosen to demonstrate making Scales of Justice, this process is very similar to any other stop frame animation, and you can use any set of image sequences you choose.

‘Sprite’-based animation using a sequence of stills

With CrazyTalk 3 open in Stage Mode and your timeline at Frame 1, go to the create menu, and choose create media, props. Navigate to the folder that contains your static images. You can drag your mouse or press control + A to select all the images and then press Open.

Your new prop will appear in a red box, displaying only the last image in your set. These images are the new prop’s “sprites” and to choose between them we’ll use the Sprite Editor. To open the Sprite Editor use the icon on the toolbar, go to the animation menu and choose sprite editor, or press the letter S.

To animate our scales we’ll advance the frame and choose different images. Crazy talk also has an advanced timeline that keeps track of everything we can do to our prop, but we don’t really need it for simple sprite animation. My animation is running at 30 frames per second, so every three frames represents 1/10 of a second.

Now, I’ve numbered all my sprites to make it easier for me to keep track — the numbers beginning with zero tilt to the left, and the numbers counting by 10s tilt to the right. I’ll advance my frames by three and change the sprite image until I get to 04, then I’ll backtrack to 00 and go ahead with images 10 to 40, and finally backtrack once more 00.

Now I’ll rewind my animation and press play. We can open the timeline to see more clearly what we’ve done. The little diamonds represent “keyframes” corresponding to the image changes we’ve made, and you’ll notice they’re always three squares apart, representing three frames or 1/10 of a second. In real life a scale might move more slowly at the top and the bottom of its swing, swing a little less each time, and eventually settle in the middle.

We can drag these keyframes to new positions on the timeline, copy paste, and even delete ones we don’t want. The scale will move faster when the key frames are closer together, and slower when they’re further apart.

I experimented and ended up with this animation which is 180 frames, or 6 seconds of motion, followed by 2 seconds of nothing, so you can see that the scale has stopped. To save your animation go to the file menu and switch to composer mode, and then choose file, save prop. Your new prop will be found in the content Manager under the Custom Props tab.  

CrazyTalk Animator 3 also makes it easy to render your animation as an MP4.

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