Being creative with your images, by adding in frames and using fancy options from photography apps is a lot of fun and everybody's doing it. Wouldn't it be better to put your high resolution camera to better use by creating your own film, with special effects and audio along with it? These days, having a say, spreading a message or starting up small is becoming the norm. However we are slackened by the lack of special effects provided in our phones to really set the imagination in motion. For a cheap option of shooting your own feature film, iStopMotion for iPad is the app for you.



Now iStopMotion has been around for a couple of years almost now, its creator, Boinx Software just updated the app to include complete audio support in the clip editor, and therefore this app deserves a review to see how effective it is.

With the iStopMotion for iPad you can take  single frame shots and afterward add audio to create a stop motion animation.

Audio tracks can be added by importing from an app, or by getting them off your iPad music library, or through SoundCloud or DropBox or simply through  iTunes File Sharing. The app further permits recording through the app itself, so when getting dialogue, you needn't exit the app only to revisit and import, ah tedious process! You can even create a movie around the audio recorded, or vice versa.

The app first instructs you to set up a scene to start the movie making. The foremost important aspect of a movie is the backdrop, and stage, these immediately set the mood for the rest of the movie. Next, is choosing your subjects.  You can either add your toys, or even fruits and vegetables as your subjects! So now, all you got to do is snap pictures of your subjects with iStopMotion. Also available is a remote app that you could download onto your iPhone, through which you can take shots, you know like an extra pair of hands at the studio.

The time lapse feature, let's you take pictures of  ongoing events live, for example to use in a documentary type project. For this you'll need to set the timer as per your liking, like giving one picture an interval of one second, two or a few, and this is basically the lapse feature. You can even get a flexible  lapse time of one and a half seconds.

After capturing your footage and adding audio to it, these animated movies can be viewed by friends and family on YouTube and Dropbox. You can even email your films to your desired recipient or send in your work of art to Boinx, which may make it a part of their  iStopMotion theater. The iStopMotion for iPad.You can visit the theater to see others’ films. Some of them are pretty impressive.

The app is worth a download, for those who are on a quiet weekend, and want to have some fun, or for those enthralled with the filming world, and want a  kick start through a simple app.

This is an uncomplicated app, and perhaps too less complicated, that you expect more features. For instance, if you wish to edit the audio, you cannot do this in the app itself, but have to edit it using another application and then re-import the edited version into the app. Hopefully, we'll see another update soon, for now this app is pretty good.