Stop Motion for 5 and 6 yo's

My 5 1/2 yo decided that he really needed to do LEGO stop motion videos like his 16 yo friend Clark does.  Unfortunately, he doesn't read yet and he has big plans in his head about how it will work.

You can check out some of my son's stop motion videos on the youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/lwhipker?feature=mhee)

However, this video one is a better one to show "how to do stop motion with a 5 or 6 yo" -- it's a Dad video taping his 6 yo talking about how she does stop motion and you can see the one she did which was with paper drawings -- I've strongly suggested to my son that he do 2-D stop motion and he's pretty firmly refusing!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-hi4AYxzCc

Here's what we've learned on this process.

Option 1:  Windows Movie Maker

• Camera -- make sure it's mounted, take 50+ photo's of individual shots
• Download onto the computer
• Pull all photo's into Windows Movie Maker 
• Add sound via Audacity
• Add titles

PRO:  inexpensive
CON: quite parent-intensive.

The challenge with the age of our kids is that it's not very easy to see it -- my son likes to take 5 pictures, run it to see how it looks, see which frames his hands are in and delete those, etc.  Plus, he doesn't read.  And he and I both like having him be independent so he doesn't drive me crazy.  So it needs to be simple.  I tried out several other demo's to see what worked well.

I have a webcam attached to my computer and can take photos with it directly from the keyboard.

Option 2:  iKitMovie
Our first attempt (free demo for as long as we could): 

• iKitMovie (http://www.ikitmovie.com/) -- it has almost no reading, lots of sound clips, logs of drag and drop, easy to delete, easy to play
  
• really suited for a 5 to 6 yo EXCEPT it does not have enough control if the animator wants to do anything more complex so we outgrew this fairly rapidly because my son's trying to do stop motion "like Clark" -- who turned 16 today... (but has some great stop motion movies -- his youtube channel is 103clark -- worth watching some!)

Option 3: Dragon Stop Motion
We used a month long demo for Dragon StopMotion -- which is more complex and much more expensive but does more of what he wants to do (sound's a challenge -- we're using the free audacity program, and today we're probably going to try pulling it into Windows Movie Maker to combine the sound and titles).  The demo allows 50 frames per scene -- hence, all of the 7 second videos on youtube!

Option 4:  ZU3D
This is the one we finally ended up with.  Again, a long demo to try it out. But, it's great for kids to use and has many, many features (except for Star Wars light saber sounds which I've had to search out and manipulate through audacity to use).

Pros:  Easy for kids to use, very intuitive, not too expensive (relatively), allows  titles and credits to be made right in the program (very important, apparently!)
Cons:  Some sound still has to go through audacity

BTW:  For lighting, I know of some GREAT LED lightbulbs that work well for kids doing stop motion close to lamps!   My older son's FIRST Robotics Team is selling some nearly unbreakable LED lightbulbs online  ($5 shipping, regardless of how many you purchase):  http://www.teampyrotech.org/  My son puts them in some inexpensive gooseneck lamps from Target.