In August 2005, I found a unique way to kill an hour in my parents’ basement.

Setting my digital camera on a tripod, I took a couple hundred pictures of a rock, a crumpled piece of tissue paper and a pair of metal scissors, which I later strung together into the very short (and soundless) stop animation film seen below:

To my surprise, this 19 second experiment has piqued the interest of my older elementary school students to such a degree that their websites, of which they had been exceedingly proud, became instantaneously passe.  And so two of my classes have begun creating storyboards for what are sure to become masterpieces rivaling the best cinema Tim Burton has ever produced.

Animating otherwise inanimate objects is a lot of fun.  (Secretly, or maybe not so secretly, I’m more impressed by the students planning to animate and anthropomorphize their food than those who plan to use Lego figures as stand-ins for live actors.)

Give it a try.  Here are some basic instructions for creating a stop animation short using the free Windows Movie Maker (as we plan to do).