Creating stickman animations is fun. As soon as I started, I was hooked and when I showed it to my little brother and my neighbor, they wanted to do it. That’s why pivot is so awesome. So I’m gonna show you all of the feature and teach you how to use them in this guide. If you’re curious as to how creditable this program is then check out an animation I made here. This was made with very little experience, it was my second video, and didn’t take very much time at all.

First of all, if you don’t have pivot stick-figure animator, go here to download it. Then unzip pivot and install it.

Now to go through the individual features of the program.

1. Frames- This is how all videos are made, with multiple frames played rapidly. To make a stickman animation uses the same process. You must first situate your stickmen how you want them to start. Then you click “Next Frame” After that, you need to move the stick figures doing whatever you want, but only doing a little bit of that motion. Then you click “Next Frame”. The more frames you use per action, the better your animation will look. For instance, these multiple frames:

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2. Creating figures- To start off, click file and then click Create Figure Type. On the screen that pops up, you will be able to construct any object you want. You can even make it thick or thin. The key to making a useful object though is by anticipating how you will be moving the object in the future and you must make sure there is a pivot point at each place you will be moving your object. After being satisfied with your new figure, click save and save it, then click add to animation. You will then be able to duplicate that object with the drop down menu directly above the Add Figure button.

3. Making a background- First, if you want to create you own picture, make one with paint and save it. Then in the stickman animation window, click file and load background and then find your background. As you can see in the animation linked to above, I actually use the background as if it were a solid object. This can be very useful to make your animation creative and unique. Keep in mind though, you can’t change your background between frames.

4. Colors- You can change the color of any figure that you want by clicking the button that says “Colour” and selecting the color you want. This can be good to distinguish what an item is, especially if you are a bad artist, and it will help to show relation between two objects since there is no sound involved. As you can see in the movie linked to above, the green people are on a team against the blue people.

5. Sizing- This will definitely help your artistic abilities. When you are creating an object, you can make it as big as you want so that you can include detail or whatever you want. Then, when the object is in the animation, you can re-size it to fit to scale of the rest of the figures. This is done by click the up arrow to enlarge and the down arrow to shrink. These arrows can be found next to the box that will start off saying 100. In my movie linked to above, my stickmen are very small. This is useful when you want to show the comparison between objects. The cliff is huge and the stickmen are small.

6. Watching your animation- Click play. You can change the speed that you watch it with the bar located next to the play button.

When you are satisfied with your animation, save it and enjoy it for time to come.

If you wish to publish your animation to Youtube, see my guide here.

If you want to create an emoticon for Windows Live Messenger, see my guide here.