Sketchpad

Getting Started with Stop Motion Studio

08

Jan / 21

08 Jan / 21

The free version of the Stop Motion Studio application will let you quickly take and combine multiple photos into an animation. Download the Stop Motion Studio app for iOS or Android to try it out! Below, Ryoko shares some tips and tricks about how to get started.

Using Stop Motion Studio

1. Select New Movie

2. Select the camera icon

3. Take a photo

4. Set Transparency

Before you take the next photo, make sure that you slide down the dot on the slider bar on the left. This gives you an onion skin (a faint ghost of the previous image that you captured) to help you see how far you have moved the object between the previous photo.

5. Finish your animation

You can increase or decrease the speed of playback to achieve your desired effect. Once you are happy with the two photos (or more), click the arrow icon to exit the editor.

6. Select your animation

Click "Select"first. Then, click the movie that you just worked on.

7. Export your GIF

Click the export icon. Click "Animated GIF" in the pulldown menu.

You can export your GIF animation to a Google drive, or AirDrop to your computer, or mail to yourself, or send to social media etc.. Once your file is on the computer, it will make it easy to share! Learn more about this simple technique and try creating your own animation with only two frames. We want to see what you come up with! Share your creations with us using the hashtags #StopMotion #TinkeringAtHome.

Related Resources

Stop motion in general

Two-frame animation

Two page flipbooks

Two Page Flipbooks

05

Jan / 21

05 Jan / 21

Posted by The Tinkering Studio

Bring a drawing to life in just two pages!

Animated videos are usually created by showing thousands of images very rapidly — which means they take a LONG time to make. But you can make a scene or story in just two drawings. We like to use this activity as a starting point before moving into more complex stop motion animation.

Materials

☐ Paper: printer paper works well for this activity.

☐ Drawing materials: like pens, pencils, colored pencils, and markers.

☐ Pencil (optional): you can use a pencil, mechanical pencil, skewer stick, or other long and thin rod to bring your animation to life.

Make Your Own Two Page Flipbook

Fold your paper in half lengthwise (hot dog style) and then cut along the fold line.

Take one of the lengths of paper you just cut. Fold it into half again to make a two page book.

Rotate it so that the folded side is at the top, and the open side is at the bottom, as shown on the left.

First, make a drawing on the bottom page to start telling your mini story. Think about repetitive and big motions, like opening and closing a mouth, lift things up and down, hammering, or dancing. Add an element of surprise by having something pop out, appear, or transform!

Next, make another drawing on the top page based on the drawing on the bottom page.

Tip: hold your paper over a window or screen to make tracing easier to make sure your images line up.

Bring your creation to life!

You can quickly flip the top page back and forth, or take your top page and wrap it around a pencil until it curls. Then move your pencil up and down quickly.

Drawing Balancing Sculptures

31

Dec / 20

31 Dec / 20

Posted by The Tinkering Studio

In partnership with Story Time with Mr. Limata, we’ve been testing out different tinkering activities with his 2nd grade class. Based on a great idea that Casey Federico suggested and inspired by Bea Rey's take on balance explorations shown below, we tried pairing building balancing sculptures with both imaginative drawing (drawing pictures of ideas and plans) and observational drawing (drawing to better understand what we’re looking at).

"Dibujar implica una segunda mirada sobre las propias creaciones, que da luz al que lo hace y al que lo recibe. Personalmente me ayuda a entender y ver, lo que realmente está ocurriendo delante mío." — Bea Rey

For background: we'd already established the difference between stacking objects on top of each other (left) and, to use the words of one student, "dangerous" balancing (right): building more precarious balancing sculptures on a point or seesaws with objects of very different weights.

This time, we showed the class 4 objects and then asked them to draw at least 2 different ways that they could either stack or "dangerously" balance them:

Then, we took a look at everyone's drawings. We asked about how they decided to arrange objects, listening to their reasoning and whether they thought their drawings were possible or impossible in the real world. We tried to create some of their drawings in the physical world to test them out:

The class then continued drawing imagined arrangements of objects, planning their future balancing sculptures with items from around their homes, or building and then documenting their own stacks and "dangerous" balance builds!