Originally posed on 2019-03-29
Since we’re still waiting on warmer & drier weather to continue renovations, we spent the week jumping head first into our daughter’s new hobby.
At school one day, our daughter’s teacher showed her a stop motion animation video on her phone (actually she was passing it around the bus on a way back from a field trip) and our daughter was very intrigued. After we had some trouble getting the phone away from her so other kids could see her teacher said that making videos like that is something we should try.
So we did.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/jA18YON5uhQ
The first video we made was a short experiment to see if we could get it to work. This first video was made with qStopMotion, a free software to see if we could get it to work and if she would still have an interest in the actual filming process. She loved it! She loved moving the pieces a little bit of the time and taking several pictures. This was also our first glimpse at exactly how many pictures are required for a very short video.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/_X4ZKvuJdM
After she showed continued enthusiasm for the project, we decided to get some better software. We got Dragonframe4. and it is leaps and bounds ahead of qStopMotion. The interface is a lot more user friendly and with live view you are able to see how it’s going to look before you take the picture. The biggest advantage in onion mode, which allows you to layer the live view and the previous picture. It has the ability to organize pictures and make notations on the frames, and allows you to open directly into Photoshop for editing.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/1pVBdNlnrc4
The next step was to find cost effective solutions for what to take pictures of. Our first thought was to use LEGO, however we discovered that is actually quite expensive and fairly limited on what you can do. Instead we got a few containers of Play-Doh and found a couple of toys are highly pose-able from a thrift store. These have been working well, along with some fishing line to make things slowly fall.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/s-EOQxpXfBM
The above video, called Ghost Fighter, is the first video where our daughter came up with the story line and planned out the shots (with dad’s help.) She was really excited during the filming process and she loves watching the videos once done. She gets a huge sense of accomplishment and the smile on her face is infectious. If you would like to see more of these videos as our daughter makes them, please subscribe to her YouTube channel and feel free to like and share the videos. We hope to be adding sound soon.Thank you for reading and hope you enjoyed the videos!
Huron The Lake 