* This article originally appeared at iPhone Life where Adam is a featured blogger.

When I saw this article over at Mashable, I said to myself “I must try these immediately!”  Especially after talking about how much I use my iPhone camera in my last post! How could I not share my filmographic adventures with you, iPhone Life-ers?

So today, I have a very special treat because I have made incredibly entertaining (well, at least moderately entertaining) stop motion videos using three free apps. I had lots of fun testing these out and I’m excited to share the results with you.

I’m considering a career in animation now, just saying.

Frame x Frame by Joby

This app, unlike Stop-Motion-Camera (which I’ll review in a moment), offers both manual and continuous shutter options. So, you can either snap pictures when you’re ready or set the number of seconds between shots (from 0.5 to 20).  You can also control the number of shots you want to have assembled by the end.  Once you’re done shooting all your frames, press the “done” button and Frame x Frame saves your animation to your Camera Roll.  You can then email it to yourself and post it on the Internet as I have done below:

This is the nice thing about having a studio full of employees.  I have plenty of guinea pigs, I mean, actors and actresses to star in my films!

Plus I’m paying them so they pretty much have to do what I say.

That was Brett.  Say “hi Brett!”

Stop-Motion Camera

This is the easiest one to use out of the three I tried. I think even my wife’s Chihuahuas could operate this one.  It offers only a manual shutter with no customization options to get you all in a kerfuffle, so it’s very easy to use if you’re new to this whole aspiring animator thing. All you do to operate Stop-Motion Camera is hit the “start recording” button to start an animation, hit the “+” button to add a frame, then tap “save and exit” and your work of cinematic genius is automatically saved to your Camera Roll. The only thing I didn’t like about this app is that it’s impossible to edit your work.  I messed up a couple of times doing this video and it made me want to punch kittens because I had to start all over again.

Just kidding iPhone Lifers.  I would NEVER punch kittens.

Stop Motion Cafe

This one’s also simple to use. You select your frames-per-second rate, press “capture frames” and hit the screen to add a new frame. When you’re done, press “elaborate movie” and it will save to your Camera Roll.  I like this app the best out of the three because it gives you the ability to save a project to work on later and it also has an edit function so you can remove frames you’re not so thrilled about. I think that’s awesome because if you’re anything like me, things don’t always come out perfectly the first time and you need a do-over button.  I can’t believe I just admitted that…

So, that’s the deal with free stop motion animation apps.  They’re a whole lot of fun to play around with and these three that I tested were all very easy to use.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got films to make!!