Tutorial: Citrus Fruit Stop Motion Food Video
In this tutorial, we’re going to show you a trick to improving your food photography game: animate your photos by using stop motion! Stop motion videos are created by a series of single photos pieced together at a high speed to create a video and since you’re already capturing food photos, you can easily take what you’re capturing to create a stop motion food video too.
What you’ll need:
Fruit - we used citrus fruits including lemon, lime, grapefruit and orange because we love the colors it gives our food video. You will need two of each fruit.
Our free stop motion app, Life Lapse that you can download in the Apple App Store for iOS or Google Play Store for Android. Download HERE!
Tripod or something to stabilize your phone
Setting up your food video
Step 1: Prepare your materials. You’ll want to slice up one of each fruit in preparation for your video.
Step 2: Set up your phone with your tripod or use one of our tripod hacks using household items to stabilize your phone. The biggest tip to capturing professional looking stop motion food videos is to have a stable phone.
Step 3: Set up your settings in our stop motion app, Life Lapse. Lock your white balance and exposure in the camera for consistent lighting. If you haven’t used our app before, we have a stop motion 101 course for you to learn the basics of stop motion here.
Capturing your food video
Step 4: In this tutorial, we’re showing the citrus fruit rolling into the frame and appearing as if it is slicing up on its own as it is rolling in. Take your first photo of the empty screen.
Step 5: Move your first fruit into the frame and take a photo of it. We are starting with a lime in our example.
Step 6: Roll the fruit into the frame a little further and add a slice of that fruit next to it. Capture this shot and repeat. To give the effect that the lime is leaving a trail of slice behind it, you’ll want to make sure your full lime is covering a bit of the slice each time you are adding in a slice. Continue rolling the fruit from one side to the other while adding more and more slices to the frame. Capture a shot each time you roll the fruit and add a slice. Use our Ghost Feature to see where to place your limes and how far you want to move the objects.
Step 7: Repeat step 6 with other fruits while you leave the slices of your first fruit in the frame.
Editing your stop motion video
Step 8: Increase the speed of your video and add any edits like adjusting the brightness, saturation or adding music. We like to Boomerang our video so that it’ll play back and forth on its own.
That’s it! We hope you enjoyed this tutorial on how to improve your food photography by animating it into a stop motion food video. If you try this tutorial at home, we’d love to see! Tag us @lifelapse_app on social or use hashtag #lifelapse.
