Stop Motion Christmas Present

I realize this post is a little dated, since it was from Christmas...but it's not my fault...I just took the tree out of the boat today.

Yep...today, February 4th.

To be fair, I took the tree "down" 2 weeks ago, but just couldn't find a convenient time to get it out of here.  So now it's in my car.  At least it's not in the houseboat, that counts for something.

Anyway, I really wanted to go homemade this year for our family gifts, but I just couldn't decide what to do.  My inspiration came from a friend who has been doing Stop Motion projects with her kids for a while.  One day when my kids were playing over there, they did some Stop Motion with them and got the SM bug.

My friend suggested that we buy the iStopMotion app for the ipad, then import the videos into iMovie to put it together and add sound, music, special effects, etc.

We started by sketching out some ideas and putting them together.  Lesson 1 is that it's harder than it looks to do even some of the most simple SM tricks.  So for your first project, KEEP IT SIMPLE.  I went with paper-sketches for my SM medium; but legos, clay and playmobil characters work well too.

To make it easier, I sketched out a basic scene and left out the faces and arms.  This way I didn't have to sketch it over and over again, I could just add the changes.  For instance, the carol part took 4 frames per person, so 16 frames all together.  The more frames, the more fluid the motion. After I did the photography sequence in iStopMotion I opened iMovie and placed the sequences in a row.  From there we added the singing.  This took a couple of tries to line up the movement of the video with our voices, but re-recording is a snap.

The project was a lot of fun, and with the technologically advanced world we live in, I was able to upload them late on Christmas eve for the recipients to see/open/get on Christmas morning.  And the kids felt very involved and very proud of the finished product.