Animation Chefs + Joe

Exclusive access to secret recipes of the Animation Chefs with expert strategies of an award-winning media skills educator. Keep reading to learn how we turn ordinary labs into content creation powerhouses!

Behind the Curtain Of Animating Kids

You’ve heard of the Animation Chefs, but their founder, and father, is probably the world’s most prolific filmmaker you’ve never heard of.

Joe has empowered over 25,000 elementary and middle school kids to take the director's chair as digital storytellers. Over the past 20 years his mission has been to turn filmmaking into child’s play.

If you compiled all the student films Joe has shepherded and produced, it totals more than 25 feature films' worth of animated stories!

Joe blends hands-on expertise with a real-world edge. Having a creative agency that served major media clients like Sesame Workshop, Scholastic, HBOFamily, Tribeca Film Festiva in New York City, Joe has reimagined a simple system of visual persuasion a 10 year old can grasp. Read on.

For over two decades, Joe has been on a mission - from school classrooms and film festivals to after-school programs and graduate education, he’s been a relentless innovator, translating Hollywood production techniques into kid-friendly exercises. While his agency work may have lit up BIGmedia’s screens, it’s his passion for teaching kids pro tips on the side that gets him animated. With the full production power of Hollywood now in our pockets, Joe has boiled down the secrets of storytelling, motion, and sound into Animating Kids, inviting a new generation to participate in the biggest communication shift in 400 years. Ready to make some movies? Welcome to Joe's world—where imagination meets action! Demistyfing filmmaking and making it accessible—even to the youngest learners.

From Joe:

“Almost half of your students want to be content creators. Are you ready to lead them?

You’re the guardians of media labs and youth programs, equipping students to tell stories with sound and motion. You already know that this isn’t optional—it’s essential.

You’ve seen what doesn’t work: random exercises and piecemeal resources found online. What you need is a complete system that scales. And that’s exactly what we’re offering.

A little backstory:

Many years ago, we made our first family animation as an experiment to help promote a book our friend had just published. It was a father/daughter authorship, and we thought the kids who helped write the book could use our advise on how to do a fun animation for their book promotion.

With a stop motion app and some paper-cutouts on our kitchen table, we made a one-minute animated trailer for the book. 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 back in the day!

Our little table-top animation was passed around from author to publisher to public relations firms and eventually led to an invite to walk the red carpet opening night at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC where we enjoyed seeing our little film on the big screen.

You can’t make this stuff up. It’s hard to over-estimate how profoundly the media landscape was changing 15 years ago.

We saw none of this coming. Totally unexpected.

We were privileged to see our animation on the big screen with Robert Deniro, Martin Scorsese, Rob Reiner, Christopher Walken and a ton of other celebrities in the audience.

The Tribeca people portrayed our efforts as the “future of kids and content”.

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.

So we decided to create a cooking show, but where we shared our secret recipes for animation.

We bought chef jackets and hats, and built a make-shift set in a neighbor’s barn

Voila’! Animation Chefs was born! Reimagining stop motion animation as the ideal way to teach kids digital storytelling. 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 make and animate a story with 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!

Soon the Animation Chefs were being viewed in 50+ 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 even had fans in Latvia!

In a few short years after we started, all the tools had 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 kids make meaningful stories in a positive, active way.

We were invited to present in places like Qatar, Rwanda, the Bronx Zoo, Apple Retail Stores, SXSW in Austin TX., and the Tribeca Film Festival again and again (pict below).

In late 2015, we dropped everything and focused exclusively on systematizing what we'd learned into a comprehensive, cumulative learning platform.

It turns out stop motion animation with simple hand-drawn sets and characters was the ideal vehicle to reimagine film making for groups of kids of all ages.

We raised funds through Indiegogo. We thought we’d be done in one summer.

It took us 4 years to complete. Our nights, weekends, holidays, snow days, and Summers were spent hashing out the best way to teach kids film making. We tested every recipe with real world kids of all ages. We had amazing help from so many wonderful people.

The end product is Animating Kids. An entire film school platform for kids and their non-film making instructors and media coaches. Hours of step-by-step, how-to videos and worksheets of evergreen principles and concepts in film making, Everything we’ve discovered as possible to teach kids - all in byte-sized 1-5 minute videos.

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!

Who uses Animating Kids today?

Media coaches and tech specialists love us.

STEM, STEAM, and STREAM instructors love us.

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 Youtube and TikTok, every kid is aspirational when it comes to content creation. Animating Kids empowers me to give them the confidence they’ll need to communicate with sound and motion.

Win, win!!”

J. Tuttle - Media Specialist

Where to from here?

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 an essential literacy, right next to reading and writing.

Below is our "vision” pose. Let turn those time-sucking devices around and make something meaningful with them.

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

“This is so much more than a film school for kids. It is an inoculation from the propaganda 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’ve seen the magic trick from all the hidden angles. They know all the bells, whistles, dials and buttons to push to persuade an audience with a story. Animating Kids 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. They know it is hard work. They are transformed by it and look at the world in a different way. We have synthesized the art and science of filmmaking into micro-bites so kids learn it like they learn reading and writing-cumulatively. And with a smart coach it scales and scales.” Joe Summerhays - Founder Animating Kids | Animation Chefs