You probably know that a movie consists of a series of still frames or pictures shown in quick succession. And when played like that your eye is tricked into making a movie out of it. If the frames are played at the right speed you just see a movie and have no perception at all of the different frames that are being played.

Well, Stop Motion Animation is exactly the same thing with the exception that you snap the pictures of your animation one picture at a time.

Let's say you put a glass on top of a table then take a picture of it. Then you move the glass to the right by one inch then take another picture. Movie it another inch, take another picture. Continue doing this until you have a lot of pictures. If you then assemble these pictures and play them quickly, one after the other you have a movie where the glass magically moves across the table. This is stop motion animation and it gives you a lot of different ways to express creativity.

Can you see the potential in this? Anything that can be moved can be animated.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to stop motion animations. Here are some ideas to get your creativity flowing.

-Drawings on paper
-Draw on a dry erase board (This is a great technique because you can easily draw,erase, and redraw your animations).
-Draw figures on paper then cut them out and use the cutouts on a flat surface - Think Southpark
-Playdoh makes a pretty good medium as long as you don't try to get too detailed or too large.
-Modeling clay works well until it gets too dry
-motion of objects - Anything that can be moved can be animated.
-Yourself Yup! stand still, snap a picture, move forward six inches, stand still, snap a picture and continue. You will end up with a series of pictures that show you gliding magically across the ground.

Here is a quick overview of what you need to do stop motion animation without spending any money.

First off you need a computer!
Secondly you need a digital camera that you can load pictures to your computer from.
Finally, the software you can use to make the actual animations is called Movie Maker and it comes free with most versions of Windows. That's it. With these three things you can make animations. If you need a tutorial on how to use moviemaker here is one: Doing the computer work