Monster Soft Sculpture Stop Motion Animations

As part of the monster soft sculpture project, I assigned students with the task of using their soft sculptures in a stop motion animation. I asked students to get into groups of 3 or less for making the stop motion animation. We used an app on the iPads called "Stop Motion Studio". The app is free and relatively easy to use. It took approximately 3 class times for students to finish their stop motion animations. I had students e-mail me the finished animation as a .mov file and I put many of them together in a video to share with the school.

Tips to Keep in Mind when Creating Stop Motion Animations:

• Give students time to get used to the app. We spent one whole class experimenting with the app.
• I think partners may have been a better idea since the 3rd person in each group seemed to have less to do. For example, one student moves the monster, while the other student takes the picture.
• I used cheap wire easel frames to hold up the iPads. I got them for $1 each at the dollar tree and I can use them as display easels for displaying artwork.
• Since students don't have accounts on the iPads, that meant that multiple classes were using the iPads and groups of students from different classes were saving their work on the app. This meant that another student could potentially delete another student's work. We ran into a couple cases where a student had done this...and I couldn't tell who did it. I strongly encourage you to stress the expectation that students are not allowed to delete other student's work. If each student had their own iPad, this wouldn't have been an issue. Just one of the limitations when you have a class set of 36 iPads to share with 600 6th grade students.

An example of the stop motion studio app

Wire easels worked great for holding up the iPads to take pictures while making the stop motion animations

I showed students the above video before teaching this lesson. It was a great anticipatory set for teaching about stop motion animation.

View the compiled stop motion animations below!