A View from Above: Making a Movie

This holiday break, my sons and I did some stop-motion moviemaking of our own. My oldest made a movie called Shovel Trouble that we burned onto DVD and then he presented it as gift to all of our family members. It was very cute. He wants to set up his own movie website, so I will hold off on sharing it for now. But, what we did was set up a webcam above a workspace, and then he draw and cut out characters, moving them one frame at time. It was a little tricky getting it set up (I had to use an old music stand to hold the camera), but once we got it in place, it worked like a charm.

Here is what our setup looked like (and if you go to the Flickr site, you can see my notes as overlays on the photo itself — more details about what we were doing).

At one point, as my son was doing some drawing, I started to make the webcam take frames — like a time-lapse camera. It was very cool. And then my youngest decided that he wanted to do the same thing, so he made a snowman. Here is a very quick documentary.


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Peace (in movies),
Kevin

10 Comments
  1. What a brilliant project – and how fortunate they are to have such a supportive Dad. I’m not sure we have the equipment to do that sort of thing here, but rest assured I’m going to try! Exposing kids to different media and letting them discover the sources of their own creativity is such an important thing. From personal experience it’s amazing to see how quickly they pick it up too.

    For example 30 seconds ago my daughter was drawing on my laptop with TuxPaint, then she calls me over to show her what she’s doing with the effects settings on Photo Booth, which she started up herself and already seems to have mastered. Really amazing stuff! I learn by watching her learn…

    Your post is a great example of inspiring the next generation I think. Thanks for sharing.

    Cheers,

    Mike

  2. Thank you all for your thoughts.
    The wonder of it is how quickly the kids can get it and do it themselves, with a little tech support. That blows me away each time (at home and in the classroom)
    Kevin

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