One summer project I had been planning for my son and me this year was to create movies together. Since my son loves LEGO and Star Wars, I thought they would make an excellent theme for trying our hands on some stop motion movies. We started out easy, I downloaded a stop-motion app to the iPad and we tested the app by moving LEGO pieces small distances and recorded each movement one frame a the time. We quickly got the hang of how it worked and so moved on to create a proper film.
The first movie was a story by my son called “Crash on Tatooine”. He had created and built different LEGO space ships from the Star Wars universe and the story told about when they crashed on the desert planet Tatooine. Our son is having piano lessons after kindergarten every week and soon there is the yearly rehearsal when he will be playing the Star Wars main theme, and what better music for his movie than this piece of Star Wars music. So I recorded him playing the piano and we included this music in the movie together with narration of the story by my son. All in all it became a very fun project.
Next day we both decided we wanted to level up, so I introduced the concept of chroma key to my son. I have a very very bright green shirt that we used as a back drop, and the app replaced everything bright green in a frame with another background. We used a chopstick with double sided tape that could attach to the back of the LEGO figures so that we could move them freely and let them fly through the air. We chose a space inspired background from the app and recorded a light saber battle between Luke Skywalker and his father. When we had photographed the whole story, we went through the movie one frame at the time. The app allows the use of a reference frame to easily erase the wooden chopstick and so we ended up with a movie where the LEGO characters were able to do all the kinds of jedi-moves seen in the movies. All that remained was to find some good background music, add some speech bubbles and a title frame and our masterpiece was ready.
Now on to new projects!
