Cloud Stop Motion by ZU3D is a new stop motion animation tool that I recently learned about from Danny Nicholson’s The Whiteboard Blog. Cloud Stop Motion is a browser-based tool for creating short stop motion videos. I gave it a try this afternoon and found it quite easy to use.

You can try Cloud Stop Motion without creating an account. That said, I’d recommend creating a free account because without one your video has to be so short that you really can’t get a sense for how all of the tools work.

Once you’ve created your Cloud Stop Motion account you should enable your webcam so that you can use it to capture pictures of objects that you place in front of it. Taking a series of pictures is as simple as clicking the camera icon in the Cloud Stop Motion editor. Your pictures are automatically added to the editor in the sequence in which you took them. You can also connect an external camera to capture and import images into your project.

After adding images to your Cloud Stop Motion project you can upload sounds, record sounds, or select sounds from the gallery provided by Cloud Stop Motion. You can also add text and title screens to your project.

When all of the media for your Cloud Stop Motion project are in place you can preview your video by hitting the play button. If you don’t like any element of the video, you can go back and edit it out. Adjusting the frames per second is a simple edit that you can make in the Cloud Stop Motion editor.

Applications for Education
Cloud Stop Motion offers free accounts for schools. The free school accounts provide 2GB of storage for every student. The school accounts also provide tools for administrators to manage student accounts.

Cloud Stop Motion could be a great tool for students to use to create short videos to animate stories they’ve written by using toys or clay models. Making a stop motion video is also a good way for students to demonstrate the steps of a long process in a short window of time.