Stop-Motion With a Special Student

I have the incredibly good fortune of being the go-to tutor for a wonderful family with two boys, one in middle school and the other in high school.

Luckily, they also have a daughter in elementary that I haven’t had the pleasure of working with until just recently.

For the sake of anonymity, I will refer to her as Lily in this post.

I reached out to this family last week in hopes to gain the experience of creating a stop-motion video with an elementary student. Thankfully, they were as welcoming as ever, and Lily seemed excited to hang out with the tutor that takes up so much of her brothers’ time. I chatted with her about what kind of shows she liked and explained that the cartoons she enjoys are made by playing a bunch of pictures, one after another, really fast. Sometimes, 30 or even 60 pictures every second! I could see her eyes glaze over for a second, trying to comprehend how many pictures it would take to make an entire movie, then she squinted at me disbelievingly. I knew I had her hooked!

I asked if she would like to make a movie, and she seemed to panic for a moment. I assured her the movie would be very short, and it wouldn’t take years to make like a Disney movie does. I showed her the Zing Studio app on my phone and explained how it works. This eased her worry, and we were quickly brainstorming while making notes on a storyboard in front of us. We talked briefly about what a character is and I asked her “What makes stories interesting?” She thought for a while, then noticed the section on the storyboard labeled what is the problem?

“Solving a problem?” She asked, uncertain. Bingo!

We chatted for a while about how conflict is often at the root of an interesting story. I explained how it would be nice if all stories were happy all the time, but we all love watching our favorite character struggle and succeed to overcome a problem. It’s really fun to cheer for our favorite character and it makes a good ending when the problem is solved! We brainstormed for a bit longer and started playing with lego as a medium to tell her story since she liked The Lego Movie. One of the lego-people had some funky hair, and I made a joke about how funny it could be if she lost her hair. Lily thought about depicting some other characters taking her hair and hiding it. The main character would look for it, eventually finding it. We later thought how funny it would be if the main character then hid the other characters’ hair in return.

Lily was surprised at how much work was involved in the making of this movie, but she was definitely invested in the process and had great fun.

We used a phone clamp with a suction cup on it, designed for use in a car, to hold my phone. It did a great job holding the camera stable, but we probably should have taped down the schoolhouse so that the whole set didn’t move. Lily and I were rotating tasks, with both of us taking the pictures at different times. Unfortunately, we can see that the zoom and focus were sometimes off. Altogether, I think it went wonderfully! Lily’s family could hardly believe we made this short movie in about an hour, and once they watched the movie, they laughed out loud at the end.

What a rewarding experience. Lily is an avid artist, painting and drawing with stunning prowess for her age. I mentioned how it’s possible to draw digital art and animate it, achieving effects much like the stop-motion movie we made. This made her eyes light up. I think we have a future animation director on our hands!