Stop Motion Animation

Click the image to go to the video

Being a professional geek, I want to introduce my children to the wonders of geekdom as well as creative endeavors. One of the many hobbies I daydream about is stop motion animation.

I've done it before with still cameras and laborious work in software to stitch the images together into an animation. That would be way too tedious for young kids. But it occurred to me the other day that there's probably an iPhone app for making stop motion animation with the iPhone's camera.

Sure enough, there are several. I read the reviews and chose StopMotion Recorder. It's dead simple to use and has a timed shutter release (5 seconds is about right) so you can get in a rhythm of repositioning the "actors" in the time slot you have to work with.

I made a couple of test animations to show Audrey and Charlotte how it works. They got it right away. So off we went to the kitchen table to have them make their own. Charlotte lost interest pretty quickly (although she liked the concept), but Audrey was really into it. Click on the image to see the results.

I have ambition to get them interested in film-making in general. I hope to entice them to write scripts that we'll then shoot and edit together to produce shorts. They might be live action, or stop motion or flip book animation, or a combination. Instead of just watching movies and TV, I want them to make their own!