Wow! This movie was a great learning experience for my students and I. The whole concept from start to finish was completely their idea. Claymation is an amazing art form! I would totally do this again with a future class.
We began this adventure with a very solid storyboard and script. In fact, I was most impressed with my students' storyboarding and script writing. They came up with some great one liners. Their favorite was the last line, "Remember, Alligreater always thinks with his stomach." My students crack me up!
Creating our clay creature turned out being a great art lesson in sculpting. Each student created their own alligator. We studied the shape of a real alligator in order to come up with a good idea of the shapes we needed. We began with a pipe cleaner to create a skeleton. We filled out the skeleton using aluminum foil. At this point we voted for the best sculpture. The winning sculptor finished off their alligator using clay animation clay. I happen to think it turned out great!
The film crew learned quite a bit about claymation and potential claymation problems. They learned that next time they should laminate their set and be certain that it is secured to the table. If we had laminated the pond it would have prevented the clay from staining the pond. The kids found it pretty funny that after Alligreater ate the number 21, it left red marks on his teeth. They also learned the importance of keeping the camera still while taking the pictures. If they pressed too hard on the camera it caused a shaking effect.
The editors had a whole new experience. They had to export the photos from iphoto into imovie for the claymation portion of the movie. Our final movie uses about 200 still images all set to appear for 0.2 seconds. The students had to mess around with the voice over and the images in order to make sure Alligreater's mouth opened and closed at the right moment. My editing crew did an amazing job with this task.
My students think this happens to be their best movie this year. After the disappointment of the iVIE awards (and they took it hard) this was a great way to learn to get right back in the saddle and create something new and even more exciting. I am pretty proud of this class and what a memorable experience it has been to create all these movies with them this year.
Thank you to Project Live for supporting movie-making in the classroom. It has changed the lives of each and every student in my classroom this year.
the final product sends a clear message.
