Making Movies and Memories

Mornings in our house generally look like this….the older kids get off to school and the younger ones get up and do their jobs. I get my coffee and breakfast and settle in to check email before we get going on our day. Some days we are slower than others…

Today as I was drinking my coffee, Ron asked about the HOWS of claymation. I told him that I was not quite sure, but that my basic thoughts were that they created the figures, took pictures, moved the figures in tiny increments….and put them all together.

We have a running dialog of things like this. “Mom, how do they?….” and then I do my best to answer.

Ron’s next question. Can I borrow your camera?

Can you see where this is going?

I can not even find my camera. So, he took my cell phone and disappeared for about 45 minutes. When he came back, he had the beginnings of a Lego movie short. He had tried several, and showed me the one he liked best. So we downloaded the pictures to the computer and made a movie.

Now, I am not really technical, so this was a first for me, too. Here are the basic steps.

1. Have a cool kid take pictures of something in sequence.

2. Download them onto a good, easy to use program. We used Google Picasa 3.

3. We edited our pictures to all be horizontal and the same size.

4. We clicked on the movie icon at the bottom, and deleted the photos from that session we did NOT want in our movie.

5. Ron told me what to type, and we created the captions for the different slides. We added some extra slides for the title and ending.

6. After watching a time or two and deciding how fast to make the movie slides change, Ron decided it needed music.

7. There is a button that says, “Add Music”, but I did not have any on my computer. So, Ron went and found the CD he wanted to use, and Baylee (our oldest) showed us how to Rip a CD to the computer. (that is easy as well)

8. Once we added the music, the movie program gives you a choice of having the slides fit the length of the song, having the song end when your slides end, or having your slides loop until the song ends. Ron made his choice to have the song end when the movie did, and we saved the movie.

9. We watched it several times, and then we uploaded our movie to YouTube.

And now, here for your viewing pleasure, is Ron’s first movie!

Adam’s First Apple

We really enjoyed the time together figuring out how to make the video. Ron enjoyed taking his love of Lego’s to a new level. What creative things did you do today?