Making Short Animated Movies With Kids
Over Christmas my 8-year-old daughter and I made a short, animated movie to share with friends and relatives. We’re not great at mailing out cards but we make a lot of fun, time-limited projects together and this was a good way to say “Merry Christmas!” to everyone.
We shot and edited only with an iPhone, mounted on a tripod with a simple phone attachment ($15 at any camera store, pictured below).
To make the movie we used Stop Motion Studio. It’s easy to learn and is made for frame-by-frame projects. In our case, we were building a drawing one frame at a time, with a rough idea of “Santa and a bunny.” We each drew a small portion, snapped the frame, and repeated until finished.
I exported the final animation as an MOV and uploaded it to dropbox. Using iMovie, we added a music track by Lucky Dragons downloaded from Free Music Archive. You could easily do everything right on the iPhone, as Stop Motion Studio has sound effects and options to add a soundtrack. The final video was uploaded to Vimeo.
