This video shows some of the steps in making a stop motion animation.

The students, aged 12 to 17, took a comic written by one of the group, Aidan Williamson with his brother Connor, and developed it into a short animation. We expanded the comic into a storyboard, the panels of which were scanned and coloured in PhotoShop. Aidan rewrote the comic in script form and the kids recorded the various parts.

An animatic, or story reel, was made matching the sound track with the coloured comic panels to act as a guide for planning the animation. Because of time constraints and the learning curve, only the introductory part of the story was adapted to the screen although the complete story was created as a sound track.

The look of the characters was adapted to 3D clay figures. The participants built armatures with aluminum wire and Sculpy. These were wrapped in cloth tape and covered in modeling clay to make pose-able figures.

The participants made a stage and animated a number of scenes using a Canon DSLR camera plugged into a laptop using Stop Motion Pro. They also learned methods for animating with regular consumer digital cameras and software that is available for free.

The camera work in this documentary is mostly by the kids and the deiting is by Steev Morgan. The project was directed by Steev Morgan and supported by a grant from the Ontario Arts Council Arts Education Projects.