I recently discovered a great little app called Stop Animator. It simplifies stop motion video by turning several camera clicks (through their app) into a video file.  This regulates the length of each frame so you don’t have to.  This makes it user friendly to kids and can be a fun way to introduce your budding A/V geek to movie making.  The app is free with the option to pay .99 for the ability to change the frame length.  

• My ten year old son wanted to use this app to make a movie with his Skylander characters.  Here is what we did:
• He came up with the plot and prepared by getting all the characters out he needed and placed them in the “movie set”.  
• I took the pictures with his iPod Touch so he could direct the action.  The action consisted of him pushing his characters a little and waiting for me to snap the next picture. 
• We shot ten different scenes from various angles.  Shooting all the videos took about an hour total.  
• Next, I loaded the clips into iMovie.  My son has been learning how to use iMovie in his summer program so he pieced the clips together using transitions on his own.  However, even if your child has never used iMovie, it’s so simple that you could use their video as an introduction to that software as well.  
• After he edited his clips together and created a credits page, we brainstormed on what kind of sound to use.  Through a little bit of searching on the internet, I found that although there is music in the public domain, recordings of that music are usually not free.  Our son took off his “A/V Geek hat” and put on his “Band Geek hat” and created primal drum music on my doumbek, while I recorded him with the iPod Touch recorder.  
• I emailed the sound file to myself, pulled it into iTunes and opened it with iMovie.  He then dragged the sound file to the project and we were done.  Editing and creating the music also took about an hour.
• We exported the movie to QuickTime and uploaded it to YouTube so he could watch his movie online (http://youtu.be/9EsKt8koXcM).

As an aside, Stop Animator will auto-save if you take too long between shots.  This prevents you from forgetting to save your work.  I would guess that it auto-saved after a full minute of inactivity.  Also, there is no sound feature because it’s a series of photo frames, but stop motion generally needs sound added later anyway.  

Creating a stop motion video that your child directs is both fun and free.  It lets them try out their ideas in a low pressure environment because they don’t have to “perform”.  And if they aren’t happy with the video, they can start over and nothing is lost.