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Moviestorm - Free Animation Editing Software

Moviestorm is free animation software for your PC or Mac.

"From script to final cut, Moviestorm will take you from initial concept to finished movie. It's easy to use, full-featured and compatible with other movie making tools, making it suitable for first-time movie makers and advanced users alike. Moviestorm has something for everyone."

The downloadable package will provide you with some basic characters and set's and you can use these to start your movie.

With a set and a couple of chracters you define start and end positions for them, dialogue, and camera movements. It all helps to create a really good animation experience.

If you're not into animation much you can actually use this to create animated storyboards for real-life movies you're looking to create.

The basic package comes with 12 diferent 'set's including "Daytime Garden", Night Time Retail", "Night Time Suburbia", "Daytime Suburbia", "Daytime retail", and a couple of 'surreal' sets which are basicaly coloured splotches.

Set-up

Your movie consists of taking a basic set and customising it for your needs. This could involve changing the lighting, time of day, the colours and scale of items on the set, or adding new items from a list of stock props.

Once happy with the set you can then start to add characters to your scene.

The characters are, again, stock characters that can be modified in quite a lot of ways. Each set or character that is modified can then be saved back to the 'stock' as a new set or characters, thereby giving you many different variations based on the provided items.

When your characters have been added, 'Director mode' then allow you to 'block' your scene. This is done by pacing characters and defining their movements both within the scene and across the scene.
Moviestorm schot 2

There is also a built in editor which allows you to take individual shots and link them together as a complete movie. Dialogue can be recorded and lipsynched (In a fashion) and the whole final movie (with music and titles etc) can be output to a number of different formats - including High Def (1280 x 720 and 1920 x1080) at several frame rates including 24fps, 25fps, 30fps, 50fps and 60fps. All output is in MPEG format wrapped in an avi wrapper (If this doesn't mean anything to you check out the article on codecs.)

Summary

I quite liked this tool although it takes a while to get used to the interface. The problem I had was that it wasn't very intuitive - although maybe this is a rsult of me not being an animator. I wanted the ability to be able to actually play with these things 'real time' as I would do when directing real actors. This isn't possible, but that's more my limiattion than it is the software.

The whole tool is free and will probably work quite well as it is. Additional packs can be purchased (for anything from £4.99 to £12.99) to supplement your 'stock'. In addition to this 'points' can be earned which will offset the cost of Moviestorm purchases. points are earned in many ways: sharing a great movie, recommending Moviestorm to your friends, or submitting a winning entry into one of the many competitions.

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