Unit and Project Overview: Stop-Motion

For my new 6th grade Digital Expressions class, I wanted to start out the students with a project that all students love learning about and creating: stop-motion. While I had not formally taught the genre in my other video production classes, my Day in the Life project for Digital Storytelling always had some stop-motion films.

Because my Digital Expressions class meets only every other week for a trimester, I had a rather short timeline for the stop-motion project. I would recommend at least 8 days for the project, but 2 weeks (10 school days) is a perfect amount of time for the students to learn about stop-motion, practice with filming and then create their own film.

To begin, I spent 2 classes teaching the students about the basics stop-motion and how to plan and storyboard for a stop-motion short using these presentations:




After the first lesson on stop-motion, I gave the students several wooden figures to use to make a quick stop-motion short as a formative assessment. It was extremely helpful in getting the students to understand the techniques of stop-motion and how to create a quick movie on iMovie.

When I assigned the students their stop-motion, I used this Google Doc and Sheet to explain the criteria and grading rubric. Please feel free to use for your class:


The students had a tough time with thinking about a story for their stop-motion object, so for future classes, I will spend about 2 days working on the storytelling portion in class before the embark on filming. I also would really emphasize to the students how tedious and time-consuming shooting the stop-motion shots can be; I had several students request extra time for their project because they simply did not calculate how many shots they would have to take for a simple 30-second video. For future reference, a smooth stop-motion film requires about 8-10 frames per second, so aim for about 300 frames for a decent 30-second shot-motion film.

When finally completed, the students actually turned out some great work. More than anything, they were able to display their storytelling skills through the stop-motion shorts which is ultimately the more important skill I want the students to work on. Watch the videos below to see the students' finished work. I hope your class enjoys it as much as mine did!