Green Screen Stop Motion

By Ashley Herrera, Library Assistant, Armijo Library July 11, 2017

This program gives kids a small look into ‘movie magic’ by getting them to create their own mini stop motion movies and/or gifs. Since the main things we used were a green screen and the Stop Motion Studio PRO APP, this program can be easily implemented. For our purposed we used LEGOS and premade figures to make small few second clips since this was intended to be a onetime attempt to see how it would all pan out. This is highly modifiable and the APP was about $4.99 to buy but there is a free version that still allows you to use the stop motion but many of the editing options are unavailable and you can’t use the green screen function. Also, there is no need to buy a professional green screen, you can use a green or blue bedsheet.

Tags: blue screen, green screen, stop motion, stop motion studio, stop motion studio pro

Type: Active
Age: Middle school
Optimal size: <5
Estimated cost: $1 - $25
Planning time: <2 hours
Frequency: Weekly

Learning outcomes

Patience – This will take time but most of the kids got absorbed into the task and it wasn’t much of a problem. The children tend to be excited and surprised at what time, patience, and diligence can do.

Planning – For those who want to create actual stories and movies a planning stage can be added so that they can storyboard their ideas.

Collaboration – we had more kids than anticipated and so focused on groups which worked out well since one was the photographer while the other was the positioner.

Editing skills – This is optional but there were a few who did want to edit their masterpiece.

Instructions

Introduce students to what stop motion is and how it has been used in television and movies such as Wallace and Gromit, The Nightmare Before Christmas, RoboCop, Jurassic Park, etc., there are many examples. Gifs are also a good example to grab hold of their attention. Explain how Stop Motion works by having multiple pictures being taking and put together to create a movie. You can explain to the children here that it is a similar concept to animation. Flipbooks are also a good way to introduce stop motion. Here are some neat stop motion videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGXhbYtYTWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDr8Hk9Q-vc
Then, demonstrate this by positioning the children in the room taking stills as you move them around and show them the end result. Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jljw38YrOOE
Once they get the hang of how it works have them create their own little clips.
Now you can introduce the green screen concept and explain “chroma-key compositing,” the best way I found to explain this was to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpmc6u1XhcE myself along with a google search to understand it myself and then modifying my explanation a bit and cutting out information that didn’t pertain to the plan at hand.
From here just let the kids do their thing and see what they come up with!

Evaluation

You can have a movie contest with friends and family or if you are in a school setting you can classes vote for other classes. There are many possibilities, including maybe a stop motion talent show of sorts. There are many online contests that the students can submit their projects to.

Other resources

Youtube will be your best friend in this project, they have lots of example videos as well as instructions on how to do specific stills (such as the superman).

Post a program

Post an activity that you think will be useful to others.