Animating a sequence of still frames

Question

I am taking a picture a day of someone, with the aim of obtaining an animation in a few months. The person is more or less always in the same pose, but of course there are minor variations day by day.

What I would like to do is to mark some reference points in each picture in order to help some software animate smoothly.

I am thinking of using a morph editor, but I wonder whether the morphing will create an uncanny valley effect. Maybe that would be less apparent if each picture only lasts a fraction of a second. In any case, I would need an editor that allows morphing hundreds of pictures, instead of just two.

Or maybe I should look into some video editor, put the frames and do some manual adjustments? I am a programmer, so the option of writing some custom code is also fine. Every suggestion on how to create this short animation is welcome.

Ideally, I would like to use some software available on Mac, but also using Linux (desktop) or Android is fine.

Answer 1

The key thing is controlled lighting, and a camera positioned so that it never moves (locked off on a tripod). It really helps to use a plain background - a solid colour is good.

Beyond that, you could assemble the images in After Effects, or as an Image Sequence in QuickTime Player, Screenflow, or many other packages.

After Effects is useful for things like this as you could overlap the images and make them semi-opaque, to see whether you need to tweak their positions very slightly.

If the lighting matches on each shot and the camera is in the same position, and the model stands at the same point each time, you may not need to morph the shots, but if you do, the built-in Liquify plugin can help with this.