Digital Animation with Stykz

There is no shortage of options for introducing digital animation to students, but hands down the favorite among my students, from 2nd to 8th grade, is Stykz. Stykz is created by Sons of Thunder Software, is completely free, and is available for Mac OS X or Windows.

Stykz is reminiscent of flip book drawings that most students are familiar with, where a stick figure is drawn on one page and then moves slightly on the next and so on. It seems like this familiarity with pencil and paper flip books is part of the reason students are so comfortable with the interface of what can be a fairly complex animation tool.

You begin a default Stykz document with a white background and a single stick figure. The red dots are pivot points that can bend, stretch and distort. The yellow point is the anchor of the figure, allowing you to move the entire figure around.

When you make a new frame, most easily done by pressing Return/Enter, and then move your character, Stykz provides a ghost image of where everything was placed in the previous frame. This allows you to create smooth animations by only making small adjustments to each frame.

Hopefully, my explanation does not sound complicated, because the software truly is not. I have briefly introduced Stykz to 2nd, 3rd and 4th graders in an after school club, and the students quickly pick up on a variety of features and tricks through experimentation and sharing with their neighbors.

If you want to add more characters to your Stykz library, you can create them, or you can visit Droidz and download figures created by other Stykz users. A word of caution about Droidz though, I wouldn’t send my students there – many of the figures involve weapons and violence. Instead, I go through the site occasionally looking for primary grade-safe figures, and add them to all of the computers in my classroom.

As with any software tool, there are endless YouTube tutorials on learning features beyond the basics. Here are a few I recommend:

• A four-part overview of the software, about 25 minutes all together. Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4
• Explanation of how to download and install Droidz figures into Stykz
• Make your character run smoothly

Take a look below at a Stykz compilation from my students this past year:

Aspire Awards Medal Winners!

Back in April, five of my (now graduated) 8th grade students created a stop-motion animation film for Adobe Youth Voices titled "Gone".  The film was entered into the 2012 Aspire Awards Film/Media Festival.  Recently we found out the film was awarded the silver medal in the narrative category by panel of film professionals, quite an honor!

The students chose the topic of child soldiers in Africa for the piece.  They collaboratively wrote the script, created storyboards, created the construction paper artwork, photographed and directed the stop-motion animation, edited the piece in Adobe Premiere Elements, and produced the soundtrack in Garageband.  They amazed me with their creativity and work ethic throughout the process, and in particular I was blown away with the soundtrack they created, a very professional end result in my opinion.

Here is the artist statement written by the students:

"Thousands of children in Africa are abducted into war every year by corrupt soldier militias. These child soldiers are placed into extremely violent situations and girls are frequently abused and forced into unimaginably heinous acts. We felt we could most greatly help children forced into warfare by publicizing a story that has been repeated throughout the world far too many times. The intention for this piece is to educate other teenage children like ourselves as well as adults who may be unaware of these atrocities."

If you have not seen it, I hope you'll watch it now (below) and enjoy!