Stopmotion Explosion Animation Kit #REVIEW

 My boys love watching YouTube for fun lego movies. They have been asking to learn how to do this for some time now.  Stopmotion Explosion has an awesome kit that is designed for making your own videos. 

What we received:

Stopmotion Explosion Animation Kit which includes - 

• Stopmotion Explosion Book

• A  720p HD video camera with internal microphone, manual focus, and clip.

• Software

 The Stopmotion Explosion book is a softbound 294 page book. Written by Nate Eckerson this book gives extensive knowledge for beginner or advance filmmakers. The book features lots of pictures. It has solutions and suggestions to get you going on your movies.

Chapters included:

1. How Movies Work
2. Animation Actors
3. Creating Stories
4. Building Sets 
5. Cameras
6. Lighting
7. Compostion
8. Animating
9. Flight
10. The Art of War
11. Sound
12. Video Editing
13. Files and Formats
14. Frame Converson
15. Sharing Your Animations
16. Animating with DSLRs
17. What Next?
18. Index

How We Used This Kit:

My two older boys are 13 and 15. They have always talked about creating movies for YouTube but we didn't really know how to go about that. We have a computer but that is about where we start and end. No software or camera. So when this kit came with everything they needed to get started they were pretty excited.

 I had them both read the book that came with this kit and I also read it. I knew they had grand ideas but I wanted them to really learn the details of stopmotion movie making. You know how to do lighting, create sets and the technical parts. If it was up to them they would just be all about the special effects but that is more advanced. The book was set up to really guide them as beginners but gave a balance more advanced ideas for future projects.

After we all read the book we started talking about our movie's plot.  I have to tell you they wanted to make a feature film - like 10 minutes long! I knew that was a bit ambitious for we are truly amateurs. So we brought out some legos and started playing out some scenarios. I got them a box to build our set.

Our set

After we built the set and we had a story it was time to start taking pictures. (We had loaded the Stopmotion Explosion Animation Software which included Audacity software in already and I downloaded Windows Movie Maker to finish off the movie.) We took over 20 pictures to make this short video. After that we put them together in the program. We recorded the sound separately. Using Windows movie maker we meshed the two together and published. Last we uploaded to YouTube.

Screen shot of the process

Our Video:

Our Thoughts:

This kit is fantastic. You really do learn a lot about stopmotion filming. I think the book covers so many details which is very important for quality. There is a learning curve and we are still very much in that process. It was hard for us to get our thoughts out on screen but we did pretty good. The camera was very easy to use. The software was a bit challenging for me - only because I needed to learn about exporting in stead of saving. Thankfully my oldest had some knowledge in this area from doing sound at church. I think the big kids working together along with me made this a fun project. I see this being something they use with often.

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