Kid Director: Stop Action Animation

Today we combined our shutterbug’s love for taking pictures with his love for trains.  He has clocked in many hours around his train table.  You may notice the red wooden engine in the video, where the corners are all worn and the paint is chipped off.  Someday many of their childhood toys may be passed on to younger cousins or sold in a yard sale, but that engine will probably remain – maybe even get bronzed as a memento of his childhood.  On a daily basis he comes up with complex storylines for his engines so I set up a tripod with his little point and shoot digital camera and showed him how to take a photo and then move a train(s) slightly and take another photo to enact one of the stories.  Then we loaded the photos on our desktop computer, removing any that were blurry or seemed unnecessary.  My tech savvy husband then loaded the photos into movie editing software and recorded our son’s voice narrating the scenes.  Then he added another layer of audio in the form of instrumental music with a creative commons license from www.freemusicarchive.org.  I hope you will enjoy his first stop animation video and maybe try your hand at stop action animation with your creative little hearts.