A blooming flower and a curious bee, a jumping whale, crazy faces and lego men adventure on the sea – that’s a short summary of my 1st stop motion animation course for kids.
Animation is my little secret hobby. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to be able to bring static characters to life. So awesome!
So how did I end up running a course for kids? Well…it started with something that I did for fun. You see, last year I created a stop motion animation tutorial to celebrate World Ocean’s Day in Newfoundland (read more here). Anyway, that tutorial helped me to join ARTIVAL festival and run my 1st ever workshop (!).
Was I scared? Of course! As a mum of two teenagers, I have experience with kids at different age and I did many creative things with them. However being a mum doesn’t give you a license for ‘being a child friendly person’ if you know what I mean… Also two teenagers is not the same as 8 kids, this is how many came!
The course took place in Art Escape Studios, so I was happy to know the venue very well. Thanks to that I could plan my whole set up at home.
On top of the materials for the World Ocean Day animation, I created a few new animations plus in the last moment I decided to take some LEGO with me.
Story board as a guidance
Parts for the animation - just cut it out
Paper bee and a flower can't wait for their adventure
In the end I set up three different stations for the animations. First one was more professional with a proper camera, a massive tripod and a laptop. Second one was a Lightbox with a simple selfie tripod. A third one was a DIY stop motion animation station – tripod made of books, wooden sticks and a bit of tape.
The general idea was to show kids, that you can make your animations in many ways and you don’t need all the fancy gear for that. We used a free app called ‘Stop Motion Studio’.
The DYI station
The Pro station
The light box station
The first task was to draw 8 different facial expression and put them into an animation. We ended up with an animation of 7 faces. The result was really fun!
Each face was animated separately
Template to draw facial expressions
All together
Why 7 and not 8? You got me! My son decided, he prefers to draw instead of animating… well, as long as its something creative, I don’t mind 🙂 BTW how cool is this drawing??
After the animation of face expressions, the kids split into groups. Some were animating a bee or a whale, while the others focused on lego animations.
Luckily for me, Artival send a volunteer artist (Mira Alegre) to help me with the kids. Mira’s help was priceless (thank you again!). Together we kept the kids engaged and busy creating animated stories.
Story board as a guidance
Parts for the animation - just cut it out
Aaaaaand JUMP!
The time was flying and before I knew it, it was time to finish up.
Thank you kids for being so cool and diving into a creative world with me! Hope you had as much fun as I did 🙂
If you are curious of what we created, watch the video with snippets of animations here
ARTIVAL is a multilingual cultural festival which takes place across the Nordic region. In Denmark it was organised by Immart.dk
Photos: Mira Alegre, Nicol Savinetti