Stop Motion and Animation Apps for iPad

I have received many questions about the stop motion and animation apps I use in the elementary art room at my school. I wanted to give a list of the top four applications that I have used this last school year.

#1 iMotion by Fingerlab

iMotion is a time-lapse and stop-motion app for iOS.  You can take pictures, edit your movie and export 1080p & 720p HD videos to your device or to Youtube. Time-lapse is a technique which accelerates movement. It can be used to photograph cloudscapes, plants growing, crowds... Stop motion is an animation technique which makes a physically manipulated object look like it’s moving on its own.  An iPad tripod may be necessary to keep the camera function stable and prevent a shaky movie when creating stop motion animations. A free trial version can be downloaded, but you can upgrade to the full version for $2.99.

#2 Animation & Drawing by Do Ink

This is a fun and creative app to make animations on your iPad. The app was designed to be easy for beginners and young animators. Second grade students at West Central used this app to animate our Alien invasion of the art room. Use the drawing editor to create vector artwork and frame-by-frame (flip book) animations. Use the composition editor to combine your artwork, along with props from the Do Ink prop library, into more complex scenes. Save to the camera roll, then share your creations. This app is a little more expensive with a cost of $4.99 per download, but you can purchase the "Creativity Bundle" by Doink for $5.99 and gain access to the "Green Screen" app used with our landscape news reports.

#3 Stop Motion in iMovie (Mac)

Although not currently on iPad, but available on MACs. This is the software I use most often for stop motion animations. iMovie is packaged for free with all new iMacs as of 2003 and can very easily do the job of stop motion animation, even if it wasn’t designed specifically for stop motion. All the features are there (sound, music, image duration, etc.) and great results can be teased out of the software. Speaking from experience, you’ll want to look for the latest tutorial online since the interface can (and does) change dramatically with each update.

#4 Easy Animate by Woodland Boys Software

Easy Animate makes it simple to draw and create animations. This is a free downloadable app developed by a teenager. Isn't that awesome! This app offers several choices of frames per second rates and onion skinning and is very easy to use for even young ages. The recent updated version fixed many glitches, so hopefully it works smoothly now without any freezing issues.