Looking for an easy and cheap way to animate a photo of a person.

January 21, 2007 6:49 AM

Looking for an easy and cheap way to animate a photo of a person.

I'm looking for a way to take a photo of a person, either face-only or full body, and animate it -- for instance, make the head, arms & legs move around to music or make the mouth 'talk' etc. Not too picky about how it's animated, I just want it to be low cost and with a very short learning curve. Any web apps or other packages that will do this?

posted by mattholomew to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

There's a flash site whose name I've forgotten where you draw a person, and the site creates a dancing animation of the drawing. If you know someone who can draw a realistic drawing of the person in question, then that might be a solution.
posted by martinrebas at 7:02 AM on January 21, 2007

You can make animated .gifs out of pictures you have posted to Flickr with this. All you really have to do is make sure that you get the pictures in the right order.

I'd suggest making a set of photos, all in the right order, with several "duplicates" in reserve, in case you need to fill in space between timed, animated events. That way, if something isn't timed just right, you can just drag a duplicate into the sequence to slow it down.
posted by interrobang at 7:12 AM on January 21, 2007

if you have all the frames ready you can use unfreez to do it.

if not the gimp has some animation facilities, but I'm not sure how easy they are to make
posted by Iananan at 10:42 AM on January 21, 2007