Digital Stop Motion Animations

I love the idea of stop motion animation but not the headache of it. It is something I have always wanted to try in the classroom but when I started thinking about all the "stuff" it requires - props, lighting, storage space, a fixed camera, software, oddles of time...I pretty much said:

I follow an art teacher (Tricia Fuglestad) on Twitter who does an excellent job blending art and technology together and she did a recent post on stop motion. This got me thinking about a "Flipbook with Google Slides" session I took at a conference last summer with Abby Schiferl where I created a vocabulary animation for science.

I decided to use digital tools to try and re-create some of Tricia's samples.

They were super easy to make. I did find one of the best and most helpful blog post from Matt Miller regarding formatting tips for animating with Google Slides, which helped greatly, I made the "cheat sheet" below from it.

The basic idea is that you keep duplicating the slides but move elements (much like in stop motion filming) in order to create a "moving" animation. In this example the rain drop moved around the water cycle explaining each step. Once you are done you publish it so the motion from slide to slide is automatic.

There are two ways to publish your finished animation. The easiest way is with the website Tall Tweet but that is only good for smaller animations since it is time consuming for the site to upload and render projects. The largest presentation I have uploaded to the site has been 36 slides. It is also possible that your district may block the site so you have the second option of publishing within Google Slides as well. I have made a cheat sheet below walking you through both publishing options.

Teachers in our district have been given the option of taking part in some virtual tech training over the summer and I created a video explaining the process of animating with Google Slides in one of my modules. If you are interested feel free to watch (I had fun putting it together...just ignore the district stuff I mention).

Here is a slightly more academic example that I created using the "publish to the web" option through Google Slides. This animation was close to 80 slides long.

If you have animated with Google Slides I would love to see some more examples! You can link them in the comments below or post on Twitter and tag me @atechcoachlife.

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