Do you have a child in your life who has even the slightest aspiration of someday becoming part of the Hollywood scene? Well there are many gifts this holiday season designed specifically to help bring out their inner filmmaker.
StikBot, with kits starting at just $10 bucks, are described as “social media sharing toys.” Just stick them in different positions in front of the companion iOS or Android app, and let your Spielberg side take over.
“These are posable robots with suction cups, and so basically, you buy the toy, you get a free app,” says Josh Loerzel of Zing. “The app is a stop motion animation creator app, so within 10 minutes of getting the toy you can start making videos and then go to Instagram, Facebook, Vine - whatever social platform that you use - you can start sharing your creations and see what creations other people are doing."
Crayola is offering a very Crayola-esque take on stop motion with its $25 Easy Animation Studio. With this one, first you color in a character just like your normally would, scan it into the iOS or Android companion app, and then take the Crayola stop-motion guy, pose him in front of the camera, and his movements then get applied to the drawing you made earlier. Just like that, your children are now stop-motion cartoon animation artists.
Finally, Disney’s take on this space - the $30 Disney Imagicademy Storymation Studio Stop Motion Movie Kit. Inside, you get all sorts of Disney characters, sets from popular Disney movies, but most of the magic comes in via the Storymation app.
“You take the still pictures and it turns it into a stop motion video,” says Lacy Bove of Wonder Forge. “You can add a title page, you can let it snow or rain and then you can watch your video afterwards."
The added creative bonus with this one is that it comes with molding clay so that young filmmakers can also work on being young set designers.