It has become a tradition to do a stop motion project with my son from time to time. He is now 7 and started writing stories. After a "brain worm" (brainstorm) session we chose the best story for a simple animation and started with a storyboard planning out the frames.

He chose a monkey design and started sketching. In order to bring life to the animation we decided to do draw each frame six times. The nose, mouth and tongue were animated separately against a green screen to not have to redo the background each time. For the eyes we animated it frame by frame together with the face.

I recorded him making the sound effects while looking at the animation. I also wanted to introduce him to lip-syncing using a phoneme mouth chart. He chose a style and drew each mouth shape. Since the text was quite short I just lined up the frames in After Effects. Finally he drew his signature and traced it five times to add to the animation.