I’m an expert at stop motion video. By that I mean my classroom is next to the Computer Media and Pathway Academy (CAMP) film rooms and every year I get to participate by proximity as 60+ students film stop motion videos for a couple of weeks. With that depth of knowledge and expertise, I set out to make a stop motion video intro for my new tech tip series for my school called “Tech Bytes.”
First, I knew I needed to draw. I thought about using stock images, but I knew it would be just as easy to make my own, plus then I knew I had full rights to use them. I tried Google Draw, but it didn’t have what I needed so I used Sketchpad. Then I created my apple and copied it into a Google Slide. I have zero actual artistic talent and I wanted to use the Slides to approximate the movement. I pasted in apples in different slides in different positions until I had what I needed. It took me an hour to figure out how to make a bite on the computer because I have zero artistic talent. I wanted to ask the art teacher for help, but she was giving a final and that seemed rude, so I figured it out myself.
Once I had all of the slides together I could click through and see that I had the “animation” correct. Finally, I downloaded each slide as a jpg and then imported them into iMovie. Once I added the music, I asked the CAMP teacher to look at it and help me fix it because she’s the expert. She, of course, had some very useful advice.
Overall, this was a moderately simple project and I think students could use the same steps to create an animated stop motion video themselves for projects or story telling. Even if you didn’t have iMovie, publishing the slide deck and auto-advancing the slides would allow for the movement. Students could make their own short films!
Here’s the very first Tech Bytes