Claymation- making our films into books

The last time I taught Claymation I realized that the students were not getting enough time to film their entire storyline. Time is a challenge because each 5-10 seconds of movie time takes about half an hour to shoot.


In order to give the kids the opportunity to really work through their full story, I decided to have them write books portraying their films. We used our storyboards that we made at the beginning of the session as a guide. I printed out still shots from their movie and we used those as the illustrations. A few kids still wanted to draw which was totally fine with me!

This class spans ages from Kindergarten to 4th grade- I sure love seeing their writing and the way they designed their books! Some students ran one sentence through a few pages (love!). I had a first grader use tape to "separate" the space between her writing and where the picture would go (she is such a fabulous spatial thinker!! really cool to see her ideas!). A second grader used exclamation points perfectly to accentuate how intense the car race was going on in his film- all of them were amazing!!

Here are some examples......

                              the story board for the"Aliens vs. Humans" book above

        The following pictures are the covers they designed for their DVD ;))

 How clever is adding the bar code and the price for US and Canada!!?? Awesome!!

Claymation enrichment class

 I got home tonight from our fourth class out of the five Claymation classes in this session thinking about how busy today's class was ;)....but also just how wonderful the learning opportunities are when we are making these mini-movies. It is really neat to watch!

We started the session in week one by viewing a few Claymation movies and explaining to them how stop motion animation works. Then we began to develop our characters and stories on brainstorming worksheets. After their idea was developed, I had them illustrate/sketch their characters before they manipulated the clay. I feel like sketching first is such a great way to sort through and gain new ideas!

By the time they got to the clay there was so much fabulous energy in the room! Listening to each group discuss their plots and what details their characters would have was great!

Here are many of the characters produced.....

 

The following week I gave them blank storyboard worksheets and we worked through 9 "stages" of their story that would eventually become their movie. They sketched and wrote notes covering their story from beginning to end. I'm hoping that this will help them when they are animating to use as a guide if needed. The following pictures are some of the absolutely precious storyboards and more completed characters. LOVE!!!!!