Mini-Class: Stop Motion Videos: Create + Animate
Brock Davis · Visual Artist, Creative Director
Twenty-two minutes of a working animator's actual process, but too thin to teach you real stop motion craft.
A Quick Walkthrough of One Animator's Process
This mini-class runs 22 minutes and covers exactly what its title promises: a compressed tour of how Brock Davis moves from a blank notepad to a finished stop motion clip shot on a phone. It is structured as a straight pipeline, ideation, storyboarding, gathering materials, scouting a location, composing the shot, then filming and sharing, and each lesson runs only a few minutes. The brevity is both the format's appeal and its central limitation.
The ideation lesson is the most useful part of the course, not because it offers a system, but because it shows a working method in action. Davis writes "destination" at the top of a notepad page and free-associates: a paper ball escaping a trash can, a toaster fleeing a countertop, a butter man climbing a stack of pancakes. Watching a professional's rough, half-formed sketches is genuinely instructive for a beginner who assumes ideas are supposed to arrive fully formed. The storyboarding lesson follows the same idea through to a sequence of boxes and camera angles, which at least demonstrates that a storyboard does not need to be polished to be functional.
Where the Course Gets Concrete
The materials lesson is a plain inventory: aluminum foil for reflecting light, fishing line for suspending objects, a hot glue gun, an X-Acto knife, wooden skewers, mounting putty. It is a reasonable checklist for anyone starting from zero, though it never explains how to use most of these tools in an actual rig beyond naming them. The lighting and composition lesson recommends daylight when available and names a specific three-in-one continuous light as a budget option, alongside the improvised trick of taping a t-shirt over a desk lamp to diffuse it. These are small, real details, the kind that separate a course made by a practitioner from one written by a generalist.
The filming lesson is where the course's thinness shows most. It names the shooting app and describes its onion-skin ghosting feature, which lets the shooter compare the current frame to the previous one for smoother motion, and it explains that the paper airplane transformation used 16 separate photographed stages. But it stops there. There is no discussion of frame rate, how many photos per second of footage, how to handle exposure or focus locking between shots, or what editing software might actually be used beyond a passing mention of uploading to a laptop. The course promises editing as part of its title and lesson list but barely touches it.
An Honest Assessment
As an overview, the course succeeds at showing that stop motion does not require a studio or expensive gear, and the finished project example, an animated paper airplane escaping an office desk, is charming enough to make the technique feel approachable. But at 22 minutes across seven lessons, nearly every topic gets only a surface pass. A viewer who finishes it will understand the shape of the process without being equipped to solve the problems that come up the moment they start shooting: how to keep a rig invisible in frame, how to maintain lighting consistency across dozens of shots, or how to actually assemble stills into a video.
This makes the course best suited to someone who has never made a stop motion video and wants a fast, low-pressure orientation before experimenting on their own, rather than someone looking for a genuine skills upgrade. Anyone hoping for technical depth on timing, editing workflow, or rigging technique will need to look elsewhere after finishing it.
The standout
The demonstration of building a 16 frame paper transformation, from crumpled ball to flat sheet to folded airplane, gives a concrete template for animating an object's shape change.
What you will learn
- How to generate a stop motion concept from ordinary objects and free-associate around a theme
- How to translate a rough idea into a simple storyboard of sequential frames
- How to build a basic materials kit (tape, hot glue, skewers, fishing line, aluminum foil) for rigging props
- How to choose and light a shooting location using daylight or a simple continuous light
- How to shoot frame by frame on a phone using an app with an onion-skin ghost overlay
- How to export and share a finished clip to social media with hashtags
Best for: A total beginner who wants a same-afternoon introduction to phone based stop motion and has never storyboarded or rigged a shot before.
Skip it if: Anyone who already knows basic animation principles or wants guidance on frame rates, timing curves, exporting settings, or software beyond a single naming of one shooting app.