Lets Animate Showreel from Gemma Amos on Vimeo.

With the help of UK-based creative iStopMotion animation workshop Let’s Animate, your show is always about to begin. Let’s Animate offers a number of tailored iStopMotion courses to a variety of community groups, and the party is endless. The workshops cater to school field trips, teacher training, club activities, promotional material, team building events and even taster sessions, where new animators can get a taste of the craft before choosing the right workshop for them. No matter the situation, Gemma Amos, founder of Let’s Animate, will find the perfect approach for everyone.

Gem had an interest in animation from a young age, and when she first saw Aardman’s Wallace and Gromit, she began modeling and crafting her own characters and sets. She went on to study animation at a university and graduated with first class honors. From there, she landed a job at Ragdoll Productions, the creators of Teletubbies and In The Night Garden. While she worked at Ragdoll, she began facilitating animation workshops on the side. The more animation workshops she took on, the more she realized that it was her dream career. Eventually, she left Ragdoll to start her own animation workshop company, and Let’s Animate was born.

From the beginning, Gem used iStopMotion in all of her workshops. She loves the remote camera app and often uses it to work with multiple cameras at the same time.

“In my eyes, iStopMotion is the best on the market,” she says. “The layout is extremely user-friendly and simple in design, allowing anyone to use it. We film on iPads for the workshops and it is extremely simple – just a few clicks and the animation starts to take shape. iStopMotion is definitely a market leader for everyone to use.”

Gem loves facilitating all of her workshops because they are so different from each other – she never knows what the group will be like or what fantastic stories they will create. She says that their creative energy actually inspires her own work, as well. The workshops last anywhere from three hours on depending on the type of class. For example, Let’s Animate facilitates iStopMotion birthday parties for around three hours with a half hour added in for food and party fun. Gem recommends that young animators be 7+ and that parties have a maximum of ten participants, but everything else is fair game. Many parties are based on a theme if requested – Gem has worked with children on animations based on Minecraft, Disney’s Frozen and LEGO.

The iStopMotion animation process is always one of the best parts. Let’s Animate focuses on five steps: designing and scripting a storyboard, building models and sets, animating, editing and recording sounds. It helps animators to work together to create something that each person has a special part in.

“Using iStopMotion enhances the learning experience because it’s simple to use, it gets people using modern technology like iPads, it brings communities together through animation and it helps develop creativity and imagination,” Gem says. “The whole experience is fun, energetic and easy to replicate at home.”

One of Gem’s favorite student animations is called “Pester Power.” It is a collection of stories created for the Warwickshire police force to use in primary schools. It teaches students about the many areas of danger, including social media awareness, robbery, bullying, stranger danger and more. The animations were created by a class of secondary school students to help teach the primary school children. It was one of Gem’s larger productions, lasting around ten weeks from start to finish. She is incredibly proud of her students’ work, and she is always eager to share the story behind the animation.

“Parents are always asking about the software,” she says. “I have tried and tested many programs but I have always stuck with iStopMotion.”

To check out more videos from Let’s Animate workshops, please visit https://vimeo.com/channels/letsanimate. All of the films were created with iStopMotion!

What do you want to learn from iStopMotion? Tell us about your perfect workshop!

Every student’s strengths lie in a different area, just as every creative mind has something different to share with the world. At Churchill School, a K-12 school for students with learning disabilities, alternative learning methods are celebrated, and teachers including Wendy Semsel work with students to spark the learning process in innovative ways.

Wendy is a technology integration specialist, and she works with all of the school’s classes from kindergarten to 8th grade. Among other programs, she chose iStopMotion for iPad as part of her curriculum.

“Technology and alternative assessment can be critical for my students, who do not generally do well with traditional testing and writing,” she says. “My students benefit from technology in several different ways, which I divide into categories of getting information, giving information, and also skills practice. The read aloud features of Apple computers and iPads are critical for my students to access information. Technology also allows us to differentiate instruction in reading and math, areas of weakness for our students. Projects like stop motion allow students to demonstrate understanding of concepts while using their artistic and expressive strengths.”

Recently, Wendy teamed up with Churchill’s 7th grade art teacher to create a project that would help students work with these concepts. They chose a fitting theme of spring and summer, as they wanted to do something fun for the last few weeks of school. Although each of Wendy’s projects follow a different workflow, teamwork is the main focus. The students must agree on who will be doing which job, some including director, camera person and prop mover. Wendy knows that it is a great opportunity to work on team skills in addition to storytelling, art and music. For more lesson-based projects, such as retelling a different story, Wendy asks her students to go through the story and list all of the characters, do short character descriptions, list and draw the backgrounds, make the characters, storyboard and then film the story. If time allows, the class works together on soundtracks in Garageband to add to the stories.

For the spring- and summer-themed projects, students came up with some great ideas. Some included a baseball game, a group of kids jumping into a pool, a wave crashing over a group of people enjoying water sports and an ice cream cone splatting on the ground.

Wendy’ colleague at Friends Seminary School, Judith Seidel, also uses iStopMotion with her students in her technology integration elementary classes. Wendy and Judith love iStopMotion for its ease of use, but also for the onion skin feature, which makes it easy for their students to know how far to move characters and props on the screen. Since Friends Seminary added iPad sets to each classroom, Judith has held summer workshops for her classroom teachers on iStopMotion animation. Wendy and Judith have many conversations on the best ways to use iStopMotion in the classroom, particularly about the right way to use a tripod with iPads so you can get the iPad to face down without drooping!

Wendy is moving to a 1-1 iPad program at Churchill’s elementary school, which means that each student will be provided with an iPad to use for classroom projects. This will make her school 1-1 with iPads from kindergarten to 8th grade and the high school 1-1 with MacBook Airs. She is looking forward to the shift, along with the many new iStopMotion projects that are sure to come her way.

Don’t you just hate it when some crusty booger bandit cuts you in line at the store? So does our good friend Kay Kropp! This North Dakota native let her love for all things silly and fun inspire her to create The Insultinator, a goofy, harmless insult generator that doubles as a gag gift and a calendar, reminding you not to take life too seriously.

Kay used iStopMotion for the iPad to create her Kickstarter video so she could raise funds for production.

“It made shooting my first stop motion animation less intimidating and mostly a lot of fun,” she says.

Kay currently has 34 backers for The Insultinator through her successful Kickstarter campaign. With over 54,872 crazy combinations, this spiral-bound book of laughs is something the whole family can enjoy.

In just two and half minutes, Kay does an excellent job of convincing potential investors to back The Insultinator with fun transitions, a cool demo and the perfect combinations of hysterical names. But don’t take our word for it – check it out for yourself above! To donate, please visit Kay’s Kickstarter page here. Next time you have a crazy idea, let iStopMotion bring it to life!