Easy Software to create animation for 6 year old

[Sanjeevani Pandit]

Hello,

My son Sid is 6 years old. His current interest is to make his own cartoon characters and make a movie with them.

He has drawn a total of 6 characters complete with names and their characteristics defined. Now he wants to convert these into animated cartoons.

It would be great if you could suggest an animation software which is easy to use for a 6 year old.

It could be either a PC software or he also uses an ipad.

All and any help with this regards is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Sanju

[Meredith]

Did  you post on Always Learning, too? I've been trying to reply there all day, but yahoo won't let me post - good thing I looked here, too. 

Mo uses Pencil and sometimes Scratch for animation - both available for free downloads. Pencil is specifically created for people who like classic hand-drawn animation and is a little complicated as a result - moreso than Scratch, although Scratch requires more reading and drag-and-drop programming while Pencil works more like a Paint or Photoshop program in terms of the controls, so if he's familiar with either of those he may be able to figure it out just fine. Mo hasn't had any trouble with either but she's 11 and has been playing with various programs for years, so there are things which are obvious and intuitive to her that I'm stuck puzzling over and checking the manual! Scratch has great interactive tutorials and templates and is more aimed at kids, but I don't think you can scan in drawings - I think you can with Pencil. 

If your son doesn't like to draw with a mouse, it might be worth your while to get a drawing pen and tablet - the cheapest brand is Bamboo. It takes a little getting used to looking at the screen instead of the paper, but has the advantage of using the same drawing motions as a pen or pencil or brush. The tip is pressure sensitive, and the fancier versions have the option of using a variety of different tips, including brush tips so you can do the same sorts of things on screen you can by hand.

[Amy Smith]

There's an iPhone/iPad app called iMotion HD that does stop motion animation. The app is free for the basic version. You can take pictures of anything in a sequence and put it together to make stop animation. It might work to take pictures of his drawings if he had several in a series, and then the app would animate them. It would take a lot of drawings, though, I would think.