Together with kids we recorded the fairy tail “Scary night”. This is from story book “Stories for boys”. Besides this story there are several awesome stories.
At the moment only place where you would be able to get it is in children library.
The idea felt pretty simple. Take a small story, split roles between the kids and record it. That should not be really complicated. At least that what i thought.
We had red this story at the bed time several times and also had tried out split the roles for the story. But when we started to actually record the story, things did not go so smoothly.
Anyway, we managed to record, with several takes, singing in between, making farting sounds into mic, because its more fun that way….
We highly recommend to try this out for yourselves. Split the roles between kids and even if you don’t record, its a good way how to involve your kids into story telling.
When kids are involved in story the follow the story, and remembers more details. This trains kids in listening and retelling the stories, trains the memory. And its fun.
Record it, film it or use dolls or teddy bears for the recreation of the story.
Our result
This is result of our hard work
- We recorded sound into computer with use of Audacity and external USB microphone
- We did edition of the sound with the use of Audacity
- Used illustrations for animation of the video, and we did manipulation of images with use of Gimp
- To animate the illustrations we did use Blender
- Some sound effects, background sounds are coming from Freesound.org
- Published on our Youtube channel to share with our friends
Recommendations
We have such recommendations based from our experience:
- Patience – for sure you will need that
- Short story – longer story, will take more time to get it done
- Simple sentences for kids – if some of the sentences, texts are too complicated for your kid, make them simplier, make structure of sentence simpler, so its easier to remember and to retell
- Remember why you do it! – For fun, you don’t need professional studio to do it. The sound can be crappy, there can be background sounds or several takes, or you need to whisper some sentences to help kids to remember the texts.
If the end result can be sent to relatives, you managed. It will be something to remember when kids will grow up.
Necessary hardware and software
What software, hardware should you use:
- Nowadays, almost everybody has portable, computer in their pockets that can do everything what is needed for recording the story. You can record, film, edit everything on one device. So you have already everything you need to record story time with kids. Don’t worry about background noises, double takes or prompting. If its necessary at all some things you will be able to cut out of audio file.
- If you want to step up the sound quality then good investment would be external microphone that could be connected to your phone or pc. But as a starting point phones microphone should be good enough.
- Sound and video can be edited on phone, but it will be much more easier to do that on computer. There are several applications that can be used to do the editing. We were using Audacity, that is free, open source software for sound recording and editing.
There are tons of helpful videos on Youtube that can help you understand the basic work with Audacity and the basics of audio editing.
Don’t lock yourself to particular editing software, use the tools that are accessible, handy to you. - In our case we were using illustrations of the book for animation. So to manipulate the images we where using another opensource, free tool called Gimp.
Gimp is Photoshop alternative, maybe its not so powerful as Photoshop, but for our needs it was perfect. - Animation itself was made with help of Blender. Its a professional grade 3d modeling and animation software, that primary target is to do just that (3d modeling, animation).
But you can also do 2d animation and video editing in the Blender.
The learning curve is quite steep, but there are wast amount of learning tutorials online. - Background noises and sound effects would be nice to record by yourself, and maybe in next project we will do so. But in this project, we were using freesound.org library to add atmosphere to the story.
- If it’s possible, delegate some of the parts of the projects to other members of the family, kids, so they would learn how to do the editing, animation. Or for example, instead of illustration from book, you could ask kids to draw illustrations for the story, and use them instead of book illustration.
Summary
At the start, you don’t need nothing more than your phone to record your stories. With phone you can record the sound, or even video. Kids love to record and playback them selves.
Next level would be to get the recording into computer, and edit it. Add background noises or music, to get the mood of the story. Chirping birds or sounds of the forest animals.
If you are willing to invest in new hobby, then we would suggest to get some external USB microphone for better sound quality. Or external microphone for your phone.
For animations you can make just some slideshow or do whole show with the puppets, dolls or teddy bears.
Next level would be to animate the illustrations, but that’s kind of separate story on it own. Don’t be afraid of failure, just try it out. Maybe there will be something that you can look back and have recorded memmories.
If you have questions, contact us, we will try to help you out with some advice. Remember you don’t need expensive gear to start doing something. If you have smartphone its all you need for start. Good luck, and send us your results.