Whether you’re a small business owner who needs to make professional-looking videos or someone who just wants to create more attention-grabbing reels on social media, it’s time to mix stop-motion animation into your clips.

See how the video above shows a glass of lemonade being poured while the contents of a picnic magically appear below?

This combination of a video and stop motion scene is easy to create – and it can all be done in one shot on your iPhone with Life Lapse Stop Motion Maker. Here’s how to do it:

The first step is figuring out which elements you want to show in video and which ones will move through stop motion.

Perhaps you want a video of a person gesturing to different parts of a messy room as each area is suddenly tidied, or you want to individually add books to a stack while a steaming cup of coffee is poured next to your reading pile.

Set up your iPhone with a tripod (or prop it up in a cup if you don’t have one) so that all the elements are in the shot and your framing remains consistent throughout filming.

Start a new project and select the Life Lapse type in the app, then start shooting. When you film for stop motion, move the elements in small increments, making sure that you or your hand get completely out of the shot after each move.

In our picnic video above, each movement involved adding another ingredient to the spread, and rolling the lemon just a little bit, then removing our hands from the scene.

When the stop motion is complete, keep on rolling to shoot the video portion – for us, it was pouring the lemonade into the cup near the top of the screen.

Once you’ve captured your video, configuring the stop-motion animation is as simple as scrolling through your footage to grab still shots of all those incremental movements you made.

Next, trim down the part of the clip you want to use as the video “background” to this animation.

Here’s where the magic happens: the app will prompt you to draw a mask on top of your video that covers the area of your stop-motion action in the frame. Anything that’s outside of the mask will show the video footage, while anything that’s inside that mask shows your animation. Apply the mask and voilà – your video and stop motion are merged together in one shot!

The app’s extensive editing tools mean you can put your finishing touches on your creation all in one place. Try speeding up or slowing down the stop-motion to better match the speed of the video, add a filter, turn it into a boomerang or add music or voiceover. Then all that’s left to do is post to your socials and let the likes pour in!