DIY stop motion animation: An easy-peasy experiment to try at home

Stop motion animation is a filmmaking method in which objects are moved in small increments and captured in one frame at a time to create the appearance of motion when played back.

Filmmakers can use this technique to animate any object that can't move on its own. Animators have progressed from using reams of printed drawings to plasticine models that require some manual movement while using stop motion animation in films. Unusual props such as food items, animals and home objects are also being put to use in this method. In fact, stop motion videos may be made out of almost anything. So, the possibilities are unlimited. The Humpty Dumpty Circus, a short film constructed with jointed limbs to replicate the movements of circus acrobats, was the first stop motion picture made in 1898.

Help your kid understand the concept with a simple home experiment.

The Experiment

The first step is to plan the story and design the characters. How the selfish giant’s garden comes back when children are playing in it can be a story idea worth telling.

What you’ll need 

A digital camera or smartphone camera
A tripod stand
A computer or laptop
Leaves, twigs, flowers and pebbles
Paper puppets

Video editing app or software
Images/puppets of 3-4 children as characters

How-to: 

Get these on a table, set up the camera, ensure proper lighting, call your child, and start the experiment. Here’s a step-by-step guide. Help your kid follow them.

Assemble all the leaves, twigs, flowers and pebbles which would give a semblance of trees

Make sure that the image you are trying to put together is inside the camera frame and not outside of it. Once the image is set up, bring in the paper images/ paper puppets as characters required in the frame
Take a photo of the very first image and decide which object are you going to move first for the effect of the experiment to be shown
If you have decided that you want to see children playing the garden for a while, nudge them a bit to show that they are playing
Move the children (paper puppets) a bit and take a photo of it. Keep moving them for a bit and continue taking photos
You will need to constantly take photographs with tiny bits of movement here and there. You may use a twig or two to nudge the characters from one place to another within the frame

If you want to see the grass growing in your garden, line up the grass just out of the camera screen. You can slowly edge it upwards, taking photos as you go. Do not forget to keep the children playing so that they don’t become statues suddenly when the grass grows
As the grass stops growing, you can bring in flowers on the trees within the frame by adding one flower at a time for each new photo taken
If you are using a smartphone for capturing, you can download some apps that will automatically turn your photographs into animation. You may also use free, simple video editing software such as Video Editor (available on Windows 10)
Import the photos to the software. Drag and drop the photos from a timeline available. Sometimes, when you put your photos on the timeline and press play, each photo may play for a long time
To avoid this slow and long movement, you may highlight all the photos and then change their duration ranging between three to 0.25 seconds each. This will ensure that the photos play much faster and a better animation experience for your kid is created

You may also delete any of the photos you don’t like or move them around in a different order. Moreover, you can also add music or a voiceover in your own voice as the narrator of the story
Play the final animation, save it and export it as video file to watch it along with your kid later

How did stop motion animation work for our experiment?

Photographing static items such as the flowers, twigs, leaves and paper puppets etc. in a frame and then moving them around for a small amount of time while photographing each frame individually yielded many different angles of a frame. Later, when these single frames were combined through a video editor, they created a unique type of playback that simulates movement, similar to a digital flipbook.