Have you ever seen those fun stop motion videos online, or maybe watched the old claymation videos with your kids? I bet they have no idea how much work goes into making a video like that! For today’s technology project in our 31 days of STEM series, Monkey, Bo and I learned how to make a stop motion video. It’s such a fun Easter STEM activity!
Want to make a stop motion video of your own? Follow along with our instructions! This activity is one of our favorite technology activities for kids!
You’ll also want to check out the ultimate list of summer STEM activities and the ultimate list of summer science experiments.
How to Make a Stop Motion Video
This was probably my favorite technology project that we did for the 31 days of STEM activities for kids series. Monkey and Bo has a lot of fun with it, too!
Supplies:
- Jellybeans
- Large foam board
- Stop motion app (we used Lapse It Pro)
Decide what you want to use as a story. Monkey wanted to keep things simple, so we decided that our plot would be a bird eating a worm.
Set up your initial scene. We decided to use the construction of the jellybean scene as part of our story, so we only placed a few jellybeans down at a time.
Take a picture with your stop motion app. Add one or two more jellybeans and take another picture. Our app was helpful because it showed an outline of the previous photo over the current photo so that you could see where to take the picture. Our results were still not perfect, but much better than they would have been without the guide.
Repeat these steps until someone gets bored or your story is complete. Our 17 second video took over an hour to create.
When the movie is complete, save the video in your app as a stop motion video. Our app allowed us to choose how long each picture was displayed in the series (I think maybe we chose half a second or a full second per frame).
Upload your video to your desired server. We put ours on YouTube, which you can see here!
Want more STEM? Find the rest of the 31 days of STEM activities for kids posts here!
Get more homeschooling tips for moms in the full 31 days of homeschooling tips for moms series!