Working with Pivot

Pivot Stick Stickfigure Animator is free software for making stick figure animations. It can be downloaded from http://pbone.it-mate.co.uk/pivot.htm
 

Set the Size

First choose the size of your pivot by clicking Options on the menu. If you later want to export your Pivot into Windows Movie Maker, a good size to choose is 768 x 576 (or any other size where the width:height ratio is 4:3)

Backgrounds

It is very important to plan your Pivot and create your background before you make your animation.  That way you can get your animation to interact with the background.

How To Make a Background

Switch to a paint program. Windows Paint is quite suitable. Set your image size to be exactly the same as the size of your Pivot. (Hint: You can check what dimensions your Pivot is by clicking Options on the top menu.)

Paint your background and save it as a .jpg file. Keep it fairly simple.

 

Import Your New Background into Pivot

On the Pivot menu, choose File > Load Background. Choose your background image.
You may get a message about this changing all the frames of your animation. Click OK

 

How To Create Your Animation

 

How To Add in New Stick Figures

 

Exporting Your Pivot

If you want to use your pivot animation on a web page or in a movie, you need to export it by saving it as a .gif file. Go to Save Animation and then change the file type to .gif
 

You will get a message about Frame Delay. It can be useful to increase this to about 5, but it will vary from animation to animation. The higher the number, the slower your animation will run.

 

Now it's time to make some background music for your animation!

 

This page has been produced by Margaret Meijers.  Questions or feedback may be directed by email to mmeijers at ictmindtools.net

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.
Attribution should include the statement: "This has been adapted from a resource originally created by Margaret Meijers at http://ictmindtools.net"