# Mobile Stop Motion - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/mobile-stop-motion/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Video & Animation · Quick win · Rated 7 /10 # Mobile Stop Motion By Gareth B. Davies · Updated July 2026 Jamie Bartlett · Graphic designer and left-handed letterer Beginner · 33 min A tight 33-minute primer that gets you from bare smartphone to a shareable stop-motion loop with almost no fluff. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fmobile-stop-motion%2F897834940) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. ## A compact, complete loop Mobile Stop Motion does exactly what its title promises and nothing more. In twelve short lessons totaling around half an hour, Jamie Bartlett walks through the entire pipeline of making a stop-motion clip on a smartphone: gathering cheap equipment, lighting the scene, rigging the phone to a tripod with binder clips and rubber bands, locking down the camera app's automatic settings, animating a test shot, then animating a real project forward and backward before color correcting and sharing it. The structure is linear and logical, mirroring the actual order someone would work through at home, which makes the course easy to follow along with in real time rather than just watch. The equipment list is refreshingly minimal: a phone, the free tier of Stop Motion Studio, a tripod, binder clips, rubber bands, and any light source from a window to a homemade ring light. The lesson on building that ring light from foam core board, LED tape, and freezer paper is a genuinely useful aside, and it signals the course's overall philosophy of getting results without spending money on specialized gear. ## Where the technique actually lives The strongest material comes in the two animation lessons. Animating forward, using a backpack whose contents spill out and return, teaches the basics of working with a reference-photo slider so nothing gets left out of frame between shots. Animating backward is more ambitious: the coffee-and-beans demonstration requires shooting parts of the sequence in the wrong order, splicing them together, and reversing selected frame ranges in the app to build a loop that reads correctly forward while having been assembled out of sequence. That lesson does more to teach actual stop-motion problem-solving than anything else in the course, since it forces the viewer to think about shadow continuity, exposure consistency, and planning shots before touching a single object. The app-settings lesson, covering manual white balance, exposure, ISO, and focus lock, is also worth singling out. It is the kind of practical, easy-to-skip detail that separates a jittery home video from a clean animation, and the course explains why each setting matters rather than just where to tap. ## Honest limits The course is thin where it brushes against adjacent skills. Color correction in Premiere is covered in one lesson and assumes access to Creative Cloud, which not every beginner will have, and the treatment is fast enough that it functions more as a nice-to-have appendix than a core lesson. There is also no discussion of character animation, armatures, or more complex rigging, so anyone hoping to move beyond household objects and simple substitutions will need to look elsewhere. The class project itself is intentionally loose, animating anything found around the house, which keeps the barrier to entry low but means the course offers little structure for viewers who want a more directed creative challenge. For what it sets out to do, deliver a fast, low-cost path from an empty smartphone to a finished shareable animation, the course succeeds. It respects the viewer's time, avoids padding, and backs up its lighting and rigging advice with specific, testable details rather than vague encouragement. The standout The backward-animation walkthrough, where coffee beans and cream are shot in reverse-engineered pieces and then reassembled and reversed in the app to create a seamless loop, is the one technique worth the whole runtime. ## What you will learn - · Rigging a smartphone to a tripod with binder clips and rubber bands for an overhead shot - · Locking white balance, exposure, ISO, and focus manually in Stop Motion Studio so nothing shifts mid-animation - · Building a DIY ring light from foam core board, LED tape, and freezer paper - · Animating forward with a reference-photo slider to track object placement frame by frame - · Animating backward and reordering, reversing, and pasting frame sequences to build a seamless loop - · Basic color correction and export settings in Premiere, plus converting exports to a GIF for sharing Best for: A total beginner with a smartphone and an afternoon who wants a complete, no-budget path from setup to a finished animated GIF. Skip it if: Anyone who already owns stop-motion gear or wants character rigging, armatures, or advanced compositing beyond a free phone app. Clarity of Instruction Organization of Lessons Helpful Examples Engaging Teacher [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fmobile-stop-motion%2F897834940)