Inspired by Gumby, I used to love making claymation movies as a kid. It required many steps with multiple VCRs. Nowadays, kids have it easy: “there’s an app for that.”
My kids (and their friends) enjoy making movies with our iPad, especially the quick to put together movie trailers through iMovie. Trying to re-live my claymation enthusiasm days through my kids, we’ve tried a few movie maker apps, but they hadn’t entirely stuck or had them excited.
Until…. My middle daughter recently enjoyed making stop motion animation movies at an event workshop set up by Steve and Kate’s Camps. They had custom built stations to keep the set and camera in place (an important part of stop motion animation). My daughter (and her friends) were captivated and as an engineer and DIY’er, I thought, “I can totally build that at home.”
Middle was recently home with a cold/never ending fever for over a week. She likes reading, and TV isn’t a regular thing in the house, so there was lots of catching up to do. She doesn’t mind long stretches sitting still, but as someone who likes to always be moving, by day 4, I was bored of seeing her laying around.
Trying to entice her off the couch, I made our own stop motion animation station out of a couple boxes, glue, duct tape and card stock. It’s not an incredible set, but super easy and took less than 20 minutes from idea and materials searching to finished product. I took pictures and was going to post directions, but part of the fun of this sort of thing is figuring out your own solutions (and they might be better than mine!) I would think a bunch of kids who would have a blast figuring something like this out, and using it.
Here are some of the pictures.
