Our Explore classes meet everyday for six weeks and are open to students in grades 5-8. I've always been intrigued by stop motion animation as a form of storytelling but I've never taught it before. This was the perfect opportunity and I was fortunate to have our student teacher, Mrs. Leonard, with us at the beginning of the session to help lead us. She showed the students examples of different types of stop motion animation videos and created a great storyboard for students to use when planning out their stories.
Storyboard
After the students planned their stories, Mrs. Leonard led the students in a peer review activity. Students showed their storyboards to other students to get their feedback. This helped some of the students see where they might need to make adjustments in their stories.
Once they completed their storyboards and their peer reviews, students began working to create their projects. It was so interesting to see all of the different materials and techniques that the students chose to use! Many students brought in materials from home to use to create their backgrounds or as the characters in their stories. The students used the Stop Motion Studio app on our iPads to film their videos (most had the paid version but a few groups used a free version because we didn't have enough paid version licenses).
Rachel and Alexis brought in paint and paintbrushes to create all of their backgrounds. They also brought in characters and set props.
Two different groups brought in candy to use for filming their videos.
Carter used Play-Doh to create his story. He filmed it in front of a green screen. Then, he imported his video into the DoInk green screen app to add in a background.
Mason and Joe also used Play-Doh. After several days of filming, they noticed that the lighting wasn't always consistent so they figured out a way to adjust the lighting within the app.
Aiden and Jacob drew out each frame of their story using a whiteboard.
Trevor used Play-Doh but created his own background to go with his story.
Haylie designed her own set and brought in characters from home to create her video.
Finally, Tristan and Connor used Legos and a variety of other materials to create their story.
In the end, we discussed the process and decided that the most challenging aspects were lighting and not being able to keep the materials set up from one session to the next. However, most of the students were proud of their videos and said they would be interested in doing a stop motion animation class again.
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