Our October Family Make Night took place last week and we had so many engaged and enthusiastic families participate! Our project for this event was a totally new one for us – Spooky Stop Motion, which was a perfect fit for Halloween week.
For this project, participants created Halloween themed shadow puppets and scripted out short stories using their shadow puppets. Once all the puppets and props were prepared, each family used the iStopMotion app on the iPad to create their own short stop motion movie.
Families had a great time working on this project together and spent a lot more time designing and creating their shadow puppets than we anticipated. It was great to see how detailed their scripts ended up being when we asked them to storyboard their ideas before filming. Their creations were awesome, even before they filmed their movies!
We were inspired by this blog post from MyKidsAdventures.com to use a clothing rack as your shadow puppet “stage”. So we removed the white boards from our Z-Racks and used white bulletin board paper to cover them as our “stage”. We used some simple work lights from Home Depot to shine behind the stage to create our shadows.
Overall, we really enjoyed seeing the creativity and imagination our participants shared through their projects for this event and we can’t wait to run this project again! If you’d like to learn more about Shadow Puppet Stop Motion and how to make your own, you can find the tutorial on our Family Make Night website: Shadow Puppet Stop Motion Project Guide
You can also see more photos from the event by visiting our Flickr page: Family Make Night – October 2015
