Stop Motion (and an update on the pointless planting)

This week we have been making Stop Motion Animations, you know the things, like Wallace and Gromit (although the similarity between what we made and a Wallace and Gromit film very much stops at the 'it's a stop motion animation' stage!), or the Ooglies.  If you've never seen Ooglies you very much should.

Anyway, first thing we did was to set up the area, we blu-tacked my camera to a table so it absolutely wouldn't move no matter how much the children fidgeted and fussed.  Then we chose some figures to be in the animations, ones which could stand freely, moved well (ie. not cuddly toys), and were small enough to fit in the picture. We ended up with some dolls house people and furniture, along with a small plastic vet set.

Not the tidiest start ...

 Then we set up how we wanted the film to start, the children chose a character each, so not too much was moving at the same time, and decided how they wanted them to move.  It took a little while for them to get the hang of how much they should be moved each time - one of them got incredibly impatient and I had to keep making her move them back, the other took my instructions a little too literally and wanted to move them about a quarter of a millimetre between each picture.

The first six frames of one of the 'movies'

 You want around 5 pictures per second, so for a decent length short you want at least around 150 pictures.  You can make up the story as you go along but we found it was a good idea to make something leave the frame before something new joined otherwise it started to get cluttered.

I then enlisted my resident teenager to put the pictures together into a film using Microsoft Movie Maker.  If I'm honest I'm not 100% sure how she did this but if anyone wants instructions leave me a comment and I'll get her to do some print screens in a step by step.

Anyway, the finished articles came out like this:

 In other news:
The 'pointless planting' we did recently turned out to be not so pointless after all!  Three of the apple seeds seem to have sprouted, so assuming I don't manage to kill all three of them we will hopefully be able to grow a whole apple tree.  No sign of anything else sprouting yet but we'll wait and see ...

Three little apple seedlings

The biggest of the seedlings close up.  It's going to take a while to reach 'tree' status!