PhotoMotion: An iPhoneography App Tutorial

A Great New App by East Coast Pixels

Tutorial by David Hayes

East Coast Pixels, the same group that produced such winners as Photo Toaster and Title Fx, have recently released PhotoMotion. This app allows you to add “motion” to your stills…and in the spirit of all filmmakers…gives you the chance to create narratives ala Ken Burns.

I’d like to take you on a short tour on using PhotoMotion, if I might, in this article. It’s one of those quiet but powerful apps…easy to use…with so much potential.

The app’s opening screen is pretty straightforward…and self-explanatory. I always start with Settings when I begin using a new app…so let’s go there!

The Settings panel allows you to establish such basics as a White or Black background to the workspace, how many recent edits are shown…things like that. Set things up the way you want them and click on the arrow in the top left corner to take you back to Home.

Clicking on the Recent icon takes you to your list of recent edits. To open a Recent Edit, just click on its thumbnail.

Back at the Home screen, it’s time to create a new project! Click on that icon and away we go!

You are first taken to your Albums to select your first image. (I’m not a believer in keeping many Albums…like to keep things uncluttered…)

From my Camera Roll, I selected the indicated image (A) and then clicked on the check mark (B) to go to the edit screen. (Don’t let my image of “Miss Muffett” scare you off!)

The edit screen has several controls at your disposal…let’s take a tour of these before doing anything else. Click on icon (A)…

In this drop down menu you can do such things as Add Photos, Duplicate Photos, and go to the app’s Help screen. (While you can Add Photos from the Edit Screens, the Duplicate Photo control is only found here.)

Back in the Edit Screen, click on the Gear icon…

This brings up the Project screen where you can establish global settings for Video Format, Crossfade transition, Photo Duration for all photos, Title Position for all titles, Text Style for the titles….

…. and add a soundtrack to your video. I’m not going to go into this step right now, but if you click on Add Music the app will take you through the steps. (Just a note…Facebook will most definitely delete your video if you use unlicensed music…and send you a nasty warning. I know from experience…) You can also decide if you want an End Fade to end your masterpiece!

There are a couple more controls in that top panel…I’ll get to those later. Let’s make a movie!! First things first. I like giving titles to my work right away, so click on Add Title.

A Title Screen opens…and I typed in Summer Dreams. Click on the upper check mark icon to put this into place.

This took me back to the Edit Screen where I clicked on the Gear icon to pick a Title Style. For this movie, Script is in order!! Again, click on the check mark icon to put this into place.

Okay! Let’s make a movie from this still! Click on the Pencil icon to start your motion edits. (Clicking on the double arrow icon next to this will randomly establish this for you…but what fun is that?)

Here’s the main edit screen that you’ll use to establish the motion for each image. Lots going on here! Over at the “Start/End” box…click on Start then “Pinch/Pan to position the start location.” That established…do the same thing to establish the End point. Use the controls in “A” to reverse the order of things…. click on “B” to preview the animation. The Photo Duration slider bar “C” lets you set how long the image is on the screen. This is a great way to control the pacing of your movie. Click on “D” to put it all into place. You can also establish the Title Position in the lower control panel.

With the first slide completed, it’s time to add more slides! To do so, just click on “Add Photos.”

And…I did likewise for all 5 slides that you see on this screen shot. Each time I had to go back and forth with my Start/End points until I was happy with the flow. You can also add Titles to each slide if you want…but I didn’t do that for this article.

Now that my video is completed, it’s time to save. Click on the Save icon at the top right corner which will take you to the Save To screen.

In this screen you can save/send your video to your PhotoLibrary which includes your Camera Roll as well as any Photo Albums you would like. You can also send it to all the usual Social Network sites. Click on the Instagram icon and…