Stick Figure Animator: Extending the Possibilities with MovieMaker

My students have asked a few times how to get the animations they make with Pivot to stop looping, and whether they can add sound...

The simple answer to this is Yes!
Yey!
But not using Pivot itself!
Oh! So how?
By using Microsoft MovieMaker.

First of all

• Create action sequences as clips in Pivot.
• Export or save animations as .gif files (animated images)
• Open Microsoft MovieMaker and...
  
• Import your .gif files to media clips.

Once you have imported your .gif files to a media clip gallery or collection they can be dragged to the video timeline, moved around and if neccesary resequenced, as if they were photographs or video clips.
Once on the video timeline

• Scene transitions can also be added between clips, and opening and closing credits added.
• Sound files can be imported to the clip gallery too, and then added to the audio timeline to support the action, and here they can be edited, split or cropped to match the length of the movie.
• If you would rather, the narration tool can be used to record your own sound or add a voiceover using a microphone.
  

This model movie using a few clips created by yours truly, a couple by my students and a borrowed sound file from the web, was made using this process and uploaded to google video for sharing. The video file could also have been saved to somewhere like podomatic to become part of a video podcast sequence.

I guess this process would work with images from other tools with the ability to export images as animated gifs too.