What is Stop Motion?
Stop Motion, or stop action, is a way to create a video by piecing together pictures taken in quick succession. For our purposes, we will be putting our pictures into Stop Motion to start and then loading into iMovie at 10 fps… That means it’ll take 10 pictures to make one second of video! If you want to make a 1 minute video, how many pictures do you need to take? That’s right… 600!
Stop Motion can be made with ANYTHING. There are lots of examples of “claymation” which is just stop motion using clay figures.
Your Project:
To create a Stop Motion project, you need to have a plan. Working in your group decide what you want to do and write out your plan. Be sure each person knows what they are responsible to do. Are you sharing information? Are you illustrating a concept? Are you trying to entertain? Are you just going for a cool effect? Do you have a beginning, middle, and end? Plan, plan, and plan.
Camera: You will use your iPad (shoot in Stop Motion, upload to iMovie where you will add music from Garage Band). For a smooth animation there are “holders” to use to stabilize your shoot. The background needs to be the same in all of your shots.
“Claymation” Clay: Once your group has a plan create you “characters” out of clay. (Be sure you have enough to complete your project and maintain your space in the studio).
Sound: In Garage Band (on your iPad) create a short piece of music to be used for the background sound. It should be generally composed to fit the “tone” of your animation.
Saving: Be sure to the same iPad each day when you return to work on your project.
