Teacher Tech blog with Alice Keeler

Paperless Is Not a Pedagogy

Alice Keeler

Creating a Stop Motion Animation to a Lecture

Creating a Stop Motion Animation to a Lecture
YouTube video

I have long been fascinated with the RSA Ken Robinson video. Not only because the content is good but the drawing that goes along side the animation is pretty cool.

So I wondered to myself how I could make this. First, I will never make something as good since I haven’t studied art, so stick figures will be my staple, but still, I think it could be interesting. Of course once I figure it out, I will get some students to do projects this way and that will be fun.

I started with a whiteboard and an iPevo document camera on a stand. I figured out that pointing at the whiteboard will not work because it will capture me drawing, so I took a different white board and laid it on the table with the iPevo document camera pointing down at it. This worked much better, although the overhead lights glared on it so I had to turn them off.

I then used the jellycam program that you can download for free, which I learned about from Richard Byrne’s blog.

I realized that the RSA Ken Robinson video was created from a lecture he had given, so clearly they had the audio first. I had my husband record a bit in GarageBand on the Mac and I exported it as an MP3 file. Recording yourself can definitely be awkward so I had him put on a set of headphones and then we just chatted for awhile about normal family stuff and then casually entered into conversation about the simulations he does in his history class. Garage band makes it easy to edit the audio so I cut out the long pauses and the casual conversation and picked out a little over 2 minutes of audio that we could animate.

We then had the GarageBand file side by side with the Jelly Cam program. We played a few seconds of audio and then drew it out on the whiteboard clicking “take pic” every few seconds. Back and forth we went between GarageBand and Jelly Cam. Listening to a few seconds, drawing and caputuring the drawings and then back to GarageBand.

Under the soundtrack options on the left side of Jelly Cam (don’t forget to save) I uploaded the mp3 file. I found that about 2 frames per second worked out well for my lecture, obviously trial and error with your audio file will help you.

I had too many frames for my audio, I wanted the drawings to go along with the audio. It is much easier to delete frames than add them so do not be afraid to have more frames than you need to start with. I then just pushed play and as the audio got ahead of the drawings started deleting out frames. I avoided deleting adjacent frames. This is a tedious process since when I hit stop and start it starts all over again, but eventually I was able to get the drawings and the audio to be fairly close.

I exported my video and uploaded to YouTube. I thought the options would upload directly to YouTube but that is not the case. I am glad I saved the video file to the desktop first. After uploading to YouTube it seems that the audio went a little faster than the video demonstrated when I was editing so I will have to keep playing with it, but for my first attempt, it was fun.

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1 thought on “Creating a Stop Motion Animation to a Lecture

  1. I am looking to make these for some topic videos for my coaching website. I think you have the right idea for the most part, but it would almost make more sense i think to videotape the drawing and then let the video sit for a moment and then edit the video to play faster so it keeps up with it. widows movie maker is quick and easy and you can cut the video into chunks silence any sound and add the mp3 into it.

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