About Us
We are Animating Kids! Hosted by the Animation Chefs - four brothers, pictured here with their producer parents Holly and Joe. That is our late dog Sophie - sadly recently departed, but animating us in spirit!
Many years ago, we made our first family animation as an experiment to help promote a book our friend had just published.
With a stop motion app and some paper-cutouts on our kitchen table we made a one-minute animated trailer. We shared it with the author and with friends.
Fate intervened!
Turns out kids making animated movies and posting them on Youtube was new and novel!
Our little table-top animation was passed around from author to publisher to public relations firms and eventually led to a walk on the red carpet opening night at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC.
We saw none of this coming. Our invite to walk the red carpet was totally unexpected.
Stunned animators on the red carpet opening night @ Tribeca Film Festival
Paparazzi swarm the young animators! Bon Jovi was just ahead of us and Christopher Walken was behind us.
We were privileged to see our animation on the big screen with Robert Deniro, Martin Scorsese, Rob Reiner, Jimmy Fallon and a ton of other celebrities in the audience.
The Tribeca People portrayed our efforts “future of kids and content”. That kids could do a short story in animation was news back then.
We were inundated with requests to teach other kids how we did it.
Our family's favorite TV show at the time were the bizarre early episodes of Iron Chefs (the original Japanese version) way before the cooking show craze hit America.
We also were big fans of spatullata.com as well: two young girls teaching kids how to cook fun meals. (It is still available!)
We blended Iron Chefs with Spatullata’s and built a set in a nearby barn.
We bought chef jackets and hats, and rented a space to build a make-shift set in a neighbor’s barn
Voila’!
Animation Chefs was born! Reimagining stop motion animation as a way to teach kids digital storytelling at a very young age, by kids for kids, using ingredients, recipes and utensils from the 100 year tradition of Hollywood know-how.
Mom and dad put mystery items in a big soup pot and the Animation Chefs had to animate whatever fell out.
Here are a few of the early results: Justin Bieber vs Godzilla • Wooden guy with paper • Ninja Ice Cream Cone • Call of Fruity).
In 2008-2009 we put up a website and a Youtube channel!
The world was shrinking with social media apps and smartphones and soon the Animation Chefs were being viewed in 70+ countries.
Australian fans told us we’d be on TV down under.
Finland’s elementary schools were using our videos as lessons in class.
We had fans in Latvia!
It’s hard to over-estimate how profoundly the media landscape was changing 15 years ago.
Cameras, editing systems, and sound recording tools used cost as much as a house, but during that time the expensive media tech from the past migrated into our pockets as an app on a phone.
We had engaged a host of educators and parents all over the world who were hungry to help their kids participate in this dynamic new opportunity to help kids make meaningful stories with media in a positive, active way.
This led to live demonstrations in places like Qatar, Rwanda, the Tribeca Film Festival (pict below), the Bronx Zoo, Apple Retail Stores, SXSW in Austin TX., and many other venues.
Animation Chefs presenting their secret recipes @ Tribeca Film Festival Family Day in NYC.
In late 2015, we focused exclusively on systematizing everything we'd learned from teaching kids.
Boiling down everything we’d learned into a comprehensive, cumulative learning platform on the basics of storytelling with sound and motion.
It took us 4 years.
Our nights, weekends, holidays, snow days, and Summers were spent hashing out the best way to share.
The end product is this platform, Animating Kids. An entire film school platform for kids and their non-film making instructors and media coaches.
5.5 hrs of step-by-step, how-to, evergreen principles and concepts in animating and film making, everything we discovered - all in byte-sized 1-5 minute videos.
100+ follow-along videos, downloadable lesson sheets, and a 280 page instructors manual.
Over the past 15 years, our students and fans have created films with a cumulative run time of over 50 hours of stop motion storytelling.
Watched all at once, they’d be equivalent to watching all of the Pixar movies put together.
If you know anybody who has helped more kids make movies, let us know, we would like to meet them!
7-12 year olds watch the Animation Chefs reveal secret animation recipes streaming on Animating Kids!
Who uses Animating Kids today?
Media coaches and tech specialists love us.
STEM, STEAM, and STREAM instructors love us.
Elementary school teachers love us.
College professors use us as a pre-requisite for their computer animation programs.
Librarians, art teachers and language arts instructors love us.
This from a media specialist in Idaho,
“…you have no idea how amazing Animating Kids is for a grade span of K-9.
No matter the age, no matter the subject matter - my planning was basically done for me and the kids love it. In the age of TikTok, every kid is aspirational when it comes to content creation. Animating Kids empowers me to empower them.
Win, win!!”
J. Tuttle - Media Specialist
Sharing Animating Kids! with educators at SXSWedu in Austin TX.
“This is so much more than a film school for kids. It is an innoculation to the propaganda and persuasive content filling kid’s screens. Now that they know the rules for getting and keeping someone’s attention, they are like Dorothy peering behind the curtain in Oz. They know all the bells and whistles and tricks and dials and buttons to push to sell a story with media. This platform is a dis-illusioning machine. The kids get behind the magic, and understand that everything they seen on screens elsewhere is contrived and architected to demand attention long enough to get the viewer to watch to the end. They know it is hard work. They are transformed by it and look at the world in a different way. Joe has synthesized the art and science of filmmaking into micro-bites so kids learn it like they learn reading and writing. This stuff is genius.”
Jonathan Demme, Academy Award Winning Director
Where to from here?
We’ve published an eBook for beginners, A Taste of Animation, with 40 pages of video, text and downloadable recipe sheets - only available for purchase through this site.
We stream our library via private servers with a 1-year site-license for schools, arts orgs, tech camps, etc (Pricing)
Storytelling with sound and motion is the new literacy.
Below is our "vision” pose. Let turn those time-sucking devices around and make something meaningful.
We hope you join us in striking this pose, literally or figuratively, as we look to future with optimism.
Bon Animate!
The Entire Animating Kids Team
A skills-based filmmaking curriculum for young media makers.