Grade 8 Art – Stop Motion Videos

A technology integration project that was recently completed in 8th grade Art was stop motion videos. This is when you turn a succession of individual still images into a movie by stitching them together and playing them at high speed.

The students started off by looking at a variety of commercial stop motion projects, such as Kina Grannis’ music video, and then sketching out their own ideas on a storyboard. For this project their ideas had to be based around using simple paper materials that could be posted up on a wall, their own drawing skills and any other appropriate props.

We then discussed the workflow for creating these ideas into a finished movie, including setting up and taping their workspace (so they would know the exact position of everything each time they started class), using their MacBook cameras and Photo Booth to take the images and how much movement should be added with each new image (the focus here was getting the students to realize how many still images they would need to take even for just a 30-second film).

Once they had completed the filming we then looked at how to get the images into iMovie, how to remove the automatic Ken Burns effect that iMovie adds and changing the clip length for each image. They then added some basic editing options including titles, transitions and a background music track.

The final piece was then to present their finished movies to the entire Middle School during morning meeting, in the style of a film festival with an introduction from the makers and audience Q&A after the showing.

The completed films can all be seen below as well as a few shots of the class filming in the art studio:

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