I was working on a script (a short to shoot with Red #351) when my nephew Sam came into the room wanting us to create another stop motion movie. I told him that it would have to wait ’til later in the day but he has all the patience of a five year old… which isn’t unusual once his age is taken into consideration. He went and borrowed his dad’s Canon Rebel and started taking pictures. I noticed he was taking the first few hand held and I explained to him how the camera had to stay exactly in one place and so we set the camera up on the tripod and then I went back to work on the computer.

About an hour later he came into my room with the camera and asked me to make it a movie. Faced with that enthusiasm, I couldn’t rightly plead work and so I conceded to the movie maker.
He had taken 131 pictures. I dropped them into Photoshop where I batch resized them down to 720×480. I opened Premiere Pro, created a new project, imported the images and then dropped them all onto the timeline. I rendered the sequence out and opened it in Sonic Fire Pro where I played several of the scores for Sam while he watched the video. Once he picked the score he wanted, I saved that out and dropped it on the timeline under the video. We then jumped into the titler where he picked the title and the font. I dropped them on the timeline above the footage and he had me move the title sequence out ahead of most of the images so it had a black background for most of it.
He had taken every picture by himself and I used them all in the sequence he had taken them, he scored it and titled it… I was just the guy following orders. Even the first few frames he took handheld worked out for the bouncy beginning sequence.
I rendered it out and he used the Xbox360 to premiere it on the 48" television for his mom, dad, grandma, grandpa and brother.
Sam’s response? It was the automatic response for a child of 2007… "That’s perfect… now put it on YouTube."

Of course Youtube butchers the video quality, not so much compressing it as crushing it from 2,647 KB Windows Media Video file down to a 715 KB Flash Video… Google will have to improve that before Youtube is a viable delivery platform for content that anyone gives a damn about.