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There’s something far more challenging and creative than hyperlapse, the buzzword among Instagrammers right now. It’s called stop motion animation, manipulated still shots strung together to make a really cool video. Like the video above. Now imagine doing this right on your smartphone. Lapse It, an app for Android and iOS, makes it possible to create and share your stop motion video on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter.

Reviewed by Saurabh Mazumdar

But first, what exactly is stop motion?

As you see in the video above, stop motion is a technique used to create movement in an inanimate object. All you need is your phone and the subject, say a guitar in this case. After you have clicked stills of the guitar in various positions, Lapse It stitches them together at the rate of 20 frames per second to create a video. There’s no end to how creative you can get with it! Like in this video, a giant hand unzips a miniature guitar that grows to fit a full grown person.

Pointers for creating really neat stop motion videos on Lapse It:

1) Make sure the camera stays in the same position for a particular sequence. You can do it the old school way of clicking shot by shot or use the burst mode, and the app will take continuous photos and string into a movie.

2) The lighting should remain constant.

3) The position of the object must change in every shot.

Lapse It review:

On launching Lapse It, you see a simple user interface, with options for new capture, gallery, settings and ‘PRO’ (Pro version). The app lets you shoot footage with both primary and secondary cameras all the way to 45 minutes. The free version only lets you shoot in 480p resolution and for higher resolution, you’d have to get the Pro version.

I was really impressed with the manual options Lapse It offered: filters that make your footage look like a negative or a sketch, ISO, white balance, focus mode, scene mode, lock auto exposure, lock white balance (options you normally get on a professional camera). That gave me a lot more creative control compared to other apps.

Rendering was quite fast for the small footage I shot; it took around 10 seconds to get my video ready for social sharing. But I was really confused whether I could import images clicked on this app to other apps as there was no option for it. On researching, it turned out the feature was available to Pro users only.

The one disadvantage was that the app only shot 20 frames per second, which was too fast for the shot-by-shot footage I put together and required me to beef up my video with more footage.

In any case, the free version is great for those who are making videos for social sharing – and you won’t be missing out much – but more features can be unlocked with the pro version by paying Rs.159, which enables shooting high definition pictures, offers more colour effects and allows you to import soundtracks to complement the video.

Lapse It can be downloaded on both iOS and Android.