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Planning a Stop-Motion Animation

Tell students that you are now going to plan a stop-motion animation.

Distribute the handout Stop-motion Animation Checklist and go through the three steps of making an animation: storyboard, animation, and post-production.

If students have not seen examples of stop-motion, explain to them that it works by taking pictures of real things (like the pixilation example they saw) but uses objects like toys, models or clay characters.

Explain that the steps will be:

 

  1. Making teams
  2. Making or choosing a background for the video
  3. Making clay characters or choosing character toys,
  4. Making a story board or plan for the animation
Ask students if they have ever done a similar exercise, in class or elsewhere. If so, ask them to reflect on what has changed since the last time they did.
Divide the class into teams of three to six students.

 

For very young students, you may wish to make this a whole-class project instead.

If you wish to do a shorter lesson, you can have students make pixilation videos which use people instead of toys or clay figures. This will allow you to skip straight to the storyboard stage.

If you choose to have students make pixilation videos, you may wish to show them this classic example.

 

 

Explain to students that having a background makes your movie set really “pop” compared to seeing the classroom behind your characters.

Provide students with cardboard, construction paper or other materials and crayons or makers, and have them draw a simple background of their choice such as:

  • a park
  • a beach
  • a forest
  • a winter landscape
Make sure students understand that backgrounds do not sit flat with characters on them – they stand up like a wall behind the characters.
If students are not yet able to draw backgrounds, you can print the downloadable backgrounds in the Front Matter.

Next, tell students to decide who their main characters will be. There should be at least two but no more than four.

If students are using toys or models, they can choose from the available ones.
If students are making characters out of clay, they need to make sure they are able to build the characters.
If possible, characters should fit the background. For instance, a park scene might have a squirrel as a character.
If students are making characters out of clay, show the Course Presentation in the student chapter Building Clay Characters and go through it with them, then give them time to make their characters.

 

Distribute the Storyboard handouts and explain to students that storyboards are used to plan before filming. Every movie, TV show, or cartoon they ever saw was once a storyboard!
Tell students to use the boxes for quick drawings and use the text lines for a few short sentences describing what is happening.
Depending on students’ ability to write and draw, you may have each group choose one student to do the drawings and another to write the description.

 

You may also want to have the whole class complete the storyboards together on large paper.

If students are not yet able to write descriptions, have them describe to you what is happening in each frame of the storyboard.

Encourage students to keep their stories very simple: Tell them they are allowed to say “And then” twice, as in “Mary and Peter walk to the park, and then start to have a picnic. A squirrel jumps on their blanket, and then Mary and Peter run away.”

 

Once each team has:

 

  • An animation background,
  • Characters built of chosen
  • And  completed storyboard
Go on to the next chapter.

 

 

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Building Blocks of Digital Media Literacy Copyright © by mjohnson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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