My eldest Daughter Miss N who is 10, has definitely got a career in making music videos, if this Zu3D movie she made has anything to go by.  I left her and Tall Dad to their own devises with the Zu3D animation kit, pictured above and they set to work on making a video.  There is everything that you need in the pack, a webcam, a green screen and background, software ready to download and some plasticine to make models.

Zu3D is available from the online shop prices currently at £59.99

Stop motion (also known as stop frame) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Dolls with movable joints or clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Stop motion animation using plasticine is called clay animation or “clay-mation”

 

Over to Tall Dad and Miss N

Hi, this is Tall Dad, here is Miss N and I’s experience with the Zu3D Animation Kit7.

The software was very easy to install, well packaged, with clear instructions.  We thought of the story we wanted to depict, gathered together a few props, and set to work.  Once you get going one of the great features, is it shows a ghost image of the last frame, so that you can make sure that the new frame is slightly different.  You can also adjust the transparency of the ghost image.

It didn’t take long to produce the video in full, but once we had completed this we needed to add some effects and music.  Again this was easy to do, at first we tried to record our own sound, which Miss N did on her own with no help.  We decided though to go for music, and I (Tall Dad) did this, but with instruction Miss N could easily complete this on her own now.  Other features include, fading, text speech bubbles and titles. We tried all of these and they were simple but effective to use.

One thing we didn’t use was the ability to include moving images in the background, but this we would definitely use another time.

Ok here is the video we made, I hope you enjoy it.

Lost Direction!

It was great fun to do and really educational.  Great for helping your child increase their knowledge of computers.  It only took around 40 minutes to produce, so fantastic that a child can quickly see the results of all their work, and we will definitely be using it again. I think next time we will use the plasticine included, and make it with more frames per second, which is another great feature that you adapt to the video that you are making.  We have so many more ideas that we would like to capture, fantastic software, thank you for allowing us to review it.

Thank you for reading