His Treasure Seekers

One of my kids’ favorite things to do with Daddy is watch stopmotion videos made with their favorite toys on YouTube, so when we found out some of the Schoolhouse Review Crew was going to get to review the Stopmotion Explosion Animation Kit, we were eager to join in the fun.  Stopmotion Explosion generously provided us with everything we needed to get started making our own movies!

About Stopmotion Explosion

The Stopmotion Explosion Animation Kit is perfect for beginners learning about the whole process.  It contains both the equipment and the instructions to help you get started:

• 720p HD video camera
• Stopmotion Explosion: Animate ANYTHING and Make MOVIES book
• Software CD (which also includes lots of helpful extras like sound effects, sample movies, and a storyboard template)

I’m not a photographer, so I can’t really speak to the quality of the camera.  It worked fine for us and was simple to use with our computer.  It had a clip to help position it, though we didn’t make a stand for it and ended up just using poster putty (which also came in handy when shooting our scenes) to keep in in place.  I did end up using a usb extension cord to make it more convenient for us since 4.5 feet wasn’t quite long enough to reach the movie set we had created on the desk next to our computer.

The Stopmotion Explosion book was fantastic!  I knew nothing about making movies before we started this review, and the book really walked us through everything we needed to know, from writing the script to lighting, to special effects and video editing.  There was far more in it than we could absorb and put into practice as beginners, but I’m pretty sure my boys will want to come back to it as they become more experienced.  I appreciated that it was simple enough to help us know how to get started and yet detailed enough that we can keep learning from it as we go.

The only thing we really used off the software CD was the actual Stopmotion Explosion animation program.  It had a really simple interface that both my boys (ages 6 and 8) were able to use to create video.  We also used two programs they recommended (Audacity and Windows Movie Maker) to record audio and put everything together.  (The software can also be downloaded from the website if your computer doesn’t have a disk drive.)  We had no trouble running any of it on our computer using Windows 10.

Our Experience

Elijah (6) and I were the first to dive in.  We didn’t really start with any sort of story idea; we just grabbed the nearest action figures and started playing around.  We ended up creating “Supergirl Rescue.”

Just making that short little video was a huge learning experience!  I had some previous experience with recording audio with Audacity, but I had never done ANY video editing, so putting it together took a little trial and error.

Ian (8) was inspired by our efforts and created a couple of his own short videos.

 

After this, we felt we were ready to tackle something a little bigger.  Ian looks forward to oral presentations in his writing class, so we decided to create a movie to go along with one of his assignments.  He was writing about the King Arthur tale of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.”  We just had to abridge the story quite a bit so it was short enough to not be too overwhelming.  (We worked on this one scene at a time over several days, and altogether it has almost 1000 individual frames.)

We had SO much fun making this movie together.  I had to help Ian with staging each frame, but he headed up the computer end of recording the video.  Then we did the audio together and both boys really enjoyed listening to different music clips to pick something that fit with the story as I edited it all together.

Ian was really proud of the final product, and it was a lot of fun getting to share it with the friends in his writing class.  Many of them were fascinated and asked him about how he had done it.  I think several of them will be checking out Stopmotion Explosion for themselves.

We are always looking for open-ended products that allow our children to use their imaginations.  The Stopmotion Explosion Animation Kit is an awesome tool for helping kids unleash their creativity.  I look forward to seeing what wonderful creations mine come up with in the future!