Stay Home Lego Stop Motion

This year for Global Day of Design Ellie and Molly’s district encouraged students and parents to choose a project from a plethora of options that had been assembled for us to pick from. Of course, we quickly decided that we would each choose a project to complete. For some reason stop motion animation caught my eye and I started planning a video to remind people that even though we’re all sick of being stuck at home, it’s still really important.

I started by writing a draft script so that I would have an idea of what buildings/people/animals/vehicles I would need to build and find from our Lego supply.

Next I assembled the stage. A modified Riding Stable made a good house and a portion of a house Ellie built somewhere in the past made a good neighbors house. The top of the washing machine seemed like a good filming location since there was plenty of good light above it and a place to hang my backdrop from.

I also realized that I would need a way to hold my phone in exactly the same spot throughout the shoot so I rigged up a nice little Lego stand for it.

With everything assembled the next step was to learn to use the app, so I created a couple little test movies to learn how to use everything in the recommended Stop Motion Studio. The info sheet the district provided said I may need to buy upgrades, but I found the free version had everything I would need.

As I was shooting the test clips I realized timing was going to be important so I returned to my script and mapped out exactly how long each part of the script would need so I could shoot the right number of frames – 10/second or 500 for the entire video! I also made notes about what action would be happening in each segment for each character as well as cues for the audio. I actually ended up breaking these down into 5 frame segments when I started filming.

Once everything was filmed I recruited Ellie to play the kid. Thanks to D102 for inspiring me to undertake this project!