Our Claymation

Last quarter my class did a claymation on famous explorers. My partner, Elli, and I made a claymation on Vasco Nunez De Balboa. The rest of the essay will tell you a little about the good and bad parts of the production of the project.

The most enjoyable part of the project would have to be taking the pictures and modeling the clay. That was a lot of fun. For the first scene we did we had to make three people, a dog, a few barrels, a background, and a ship. We made the ship out of cardboard and the sails out of paper. Then we had to make the people. That was pretty hard to do because we had to decide what we wanted them to look like. We were originally going to make them look like their pictures in the book, but that was way too hard. We eventually ended up making them like normal people with different colored shirts. Elli made the dog that was the size of a cow. She put toothpicks in it to hold it up. When we were finished with the claymation the dog was all deformed and had the toothpicks poking out of its body. We used all of the characters multiple times throughout the project, so they got a little dirty.

A few of the most difficult parts of the claymation were probably writing up the script and computer editing. You might be thinking oh wow, computer editing is so easy, but I think that Mac's are hard. I couldn't figure out how to use the desktop or the movie editing thing. Elli kept trying to help me figure it out for when she wasn't at school, but it didn't work that well. After a while, i figured a little of it out, but elli did all the computer work while I took the pictures and stuff. Writing the script was also hard because it took a lot of thought. We had to decide what stuff we wanted to put in the claymation and what stuff to leave out. There was a also a lot of unnecessary things in my book that we didn't need. It didn't tel much about what Balboa was doing, so we used Elli's. After we found our information we had to put it in our storyboard.

One of the most important things I learned would be learning how to make a claymation. This was a lot of fun. What we did was we would start out with a making a background for the scene we were doing and then make the props and people. After that we would set up the camera so that it's in the right spot for taking pictures. Then we would start taking the pictures. After each picture we would move the little people and/or props each time. If you took enough it would turn out to look like a short movie. Another important thing that i learned was about the person, Vasco Nunez De Balboa. If you watch the claymation, you will learn more about it, but basically what it was about was a guy that sailed by South America and Central America. He had a dog and was stuck on an island and stowed away to get off it.

In conclusion, the claymation was a lot of fun. My favorite part was making the clay figures and taking the pictures. I hope you like it!

My family

My family... My family is me, my mom, my dad, and my brother, aaron. We also have a cat named lilly. I have three fish and two pigmy frogs. My cat doesn't really like my brother because whenever she's laying on the couch or something he runs up to her and practically lays on her. She ends up either running away or scratching and hissing at him. It's actually kind of funny. Ok, outside of my personal family, theres a lot of other people. My mom has three brothers and one sister which means that I have a lot of cousins. My mom's sister, Katherine and her husband Tom, has two kids, James and Allison. Allison is a year younger than me and James is two years older than me i think. They live in California but they're coming up to our house for christmas and stuff. It's going to be fun. Then my mom's brother, Mic or Michael and his wife, Mary lives here in Washington and they have two daughters, Robin and Erin. Another brother of my mom's is Matt. He's really nice and really likes Japanese movies and stuff. He's giving money to a girl in Japan! i think that's really awesome. She's really cute too. The 3rd brother is Steve and his Wife Kaki. They have three kids, Ella, Kate, and Maggie. We do a lot of things with them. This Christmas we're going skiing. I'm really excited. I love to ski. I am also doing the ski bus but im snowboarding for the first time. I'm excited for that too, i think it's going to be a lot of fun. Christmas time is probably my favorite time of the year, not because of the presents but because my whole family gets together and has a lot of fun. I also love the smells and the cool food that you can't eat any other time.

Random Topics

~Right now i am sitting in the computer lab. Elli is sitting right next to me and her computer won't let her print, and phalen is on the other side of me and shes writing comments and stuff. I have no idea what i'm going to write in this blog, so i'm just going to write whatever comes to mind.
~Halloween is next week! It's going to be so much fun. My parents decorated our house and i'm going to go to a halloween party. It's going to be awesome.
~Theres a creepy concert this Thursday! I'm going to be playing in it. The songs we're playing are House of Horrors, Music for a Darkened Theater, and Chillers and Thrillers. They're pretty cool. Theres also going to be a whole carnival thing. I heard that there was a cake walk, but i could be wrong.
~I can't wait until Christmas. I get to see all of my family again. Some of them live in Illinois, Michigan, California, Seattle, and another place in Washington but i don't know where it is. I love Christmas here because it actually gets cold. In the Marshall Islands its warm year round and it's no fun at all. They even bring in pinetrees from the states but it's still not the same.
~I hope it snows this year. Then i can actually build a snowmen or something.
~ I can't wait until it's January because i'm going to go on the ski bus and snowboard for the first time. It's going to be so much fun! I already know how to ski, well i havn't taken lessons but i can ski down a hill pretty well. I heard snowboarding is more fun and easier so i can't wait to try it.
~This last weekend i went to the broadway show, Spring Awakening. It was so awesome! It was a perfect show for teenagers even though it was made a long time ago. It has causes and effects of what could happen to teens. The music was really good too. I really want to see it again but I can't.
~ Now Elli is writing a story for her blog entry and i have no idea what it says. I'm going to read it in a minute. She's going to get mad...o well! That was all of my thoughts for the past 10 minutes. Aren't they interusting?

Bali!!

I went on vacation to Bali which is an island in Indonesia. I went during winter break and i had to miss about two weeks because we took such a long trip. I had a lot of homework to make up, but I thought it was worth it. We were living in the Marshall Islands at the time. We took a plane to Guam and then another one to Bali. We had a guy waiting for us that showed us around the whole time we were there. He was really nice and had a family and everything. Right when you walked into the airport there was this smell that was really overwhelming. I couldn't breath at first but i eventually got used to it. When we started driving down the road to our hotel that we were going to stay at, i got really freaked out becuase i forgot that you had to drive on the other side of the road. It looked like you were going to hit someone everytime you passed a car. The first thing we did the next day was go to a waterpark. It was so much fun! The next day we drove up to a different town and we went to a monkey temple. That's where i got bitten by a monkey. :) What you do is you buy bananas to feed to the monkeys, and if a monkey jumps on you and you don't give him a banana, he'll attack you. Especially if it's one of the big ones. There is a lot of other cool things you can also do in Bali. They have great shops and really low prices! I bought a lot of stuff, and by the end of the trip, i hadn't even spent a hundred dollars! I felt rich! :) Bali was an awesome place to visit and a cool experience! You should vacation there sometime! I was at the place in the picture!!! :)

Life Graph

This is my life graph. I'm going to tell you about one of my terrible experiences, getting stung by a man-of-war jellyfish. This jellyfish is one of the worst jellyfishes to get stung by. They have a head that's filled with air so they can float on top of the water and go wherever the wind takes them. Sometimes they wash up on the beach, and if you're wearing shoes you can walk along and pop their heads. It's a lot of fun. :) This happened when I was in the Marshall Islands. We were on one of our many sailing trips and decided to stop at an island called Bigej (beejee). It was covered in palm trees, pandana trees, and banana trees. It's water is a really pretty sight, it's always blue and green and warm! There is a month that's called the jellyfish season. This is when all the man-of-war jellyfish drift down to our atoll. When this season comes, you want to make sure that you swim in the lagoon because the jellyfish like to stay in the ocean where it's windy and wavy. What happened was, I found this really cool bottle on the beach and it was covered in sand, so i went down to the water on the ocean side of the island and dipped it in the water. When i lifted up my hand there was one of the jellyfish on my hand. I freaked out and tried to get it off by wiping it all over my body. (that was a mistake) I had over 60 bumps from that jellyfish. It wasn't fun. It stung really bad, and you know what you have to do when you get stung by a jellyfish? Pee on it :(:(:(:(:(:(:( EEEWWWW. It was disgusting. I hope i never get stung by one again. That concludes my story!!!!! Thanks for reading!

My summer vacation

This summer after i moved back from the Marshall Islands, I went to visit my cousins in Chicago and my grandparents in Michigan. The plane to Chicago was about 5 hours long but it wasn't that bad because I used to fly two five hour flights back to the states each year. The food was disgusting, but isn't it always on airplanes? When we got there it was like 5 in the afternoon. We had to take a bus to the car rental place and get a car to drive to my cousin's house. When we finally got there we got a tour of their new house. It was really cool. They have three floors plus a basement. My cousin's names are Ella (the oldest), Kate, and Maggie (the youngest). They live right by a tennis court and 3 parks along with a school and basketball courts. Its really neat. At night the cicadas are really loud and annoying but after a while you get used to it. After a week, we drove all the way up to Charlevoix, Michigan. The drive was six hours but it seemed like two. We had a lot of food stocked up and a dvd player so we were all set and ready to go. When we got there we put all of our stuff up in our room and went outside to pick blackrasberries and stuff. My grandpa got out a golf cart for me to drive around on his 5 acres. That was a lot of fun. My brother, Aaron, drove the lawn mower. My cousin, Ryan, came the next day. He's in his twenties and has a motorcycle. He took me for a ride. It was tons of fun. When we stopped my hair was in knots, but it was worth it. :) After we were done visiting there, we had to drive all the way back to Chicago, stay a night at my cousins house, and then fly all the way back here to Washington on the five hour flight. It was a pretty good vacation. We might even do it again next year!

Kwajalein, RMI

Kwajalein is an island on the equator in the South Pacific. Kwaj is a tropical island with lots of palm trees, banana trees, pandana trees, and much more. Some of the wildlife includes lizards, birds, and lots of sea life. The island has lots of activities like basketball courts, tennis courts, racquetball, skate park, bowling alley, library, soccer fields, baseball fields, Teen Center, movie theater, and lots of beaches. Only people that work for some type of government are allowed to live on the island. Some things that you might need if you come to kwaj would be sunglasses, lots of shorts and tank tops, sunscreen, a bathing suit, and flip flops. Temperatures there reach around 75-85 degrees a day, but there is a high humidity level so it seems hotter than it is. The days of the week can be very confusing for new comers. Instead of the normal weekend days, Saturday and Sunday, the weekend days are Sunday and Monday. One reason for this is so that people
are in work on the same days of the week.There are three different types of housing, new housing, old housing, and domes. Our family lived in a dome which is fiberglass made into an oval shape bubble. The ocean is beautiful. The water is a blue/green color with lots of gorgeous reefs to snorkel or dive. There are bright colored corals and fish along with wild dolphins. If you're Lucky enough, one might let you touch it. There is a turtle pond on the island where you can bring either turtle food or some type of vegetable to feed them. They even put their fins in the air so you can touch them. If you have a sailboat, you can sail to some of the outer islands where they have mantarays and flying fish. On some of the islands way out on the end of the atoll you can find turtle eggs and turtle tracks on the beach. I highly suggest sailing. They have a good school system for all the kids that go there. There is K.A.P.S. (Kwajalein Atoll Pre-School) which is a
good place for kids in their first year. Then there's George Seitz Elementry School which goes from 1st grade to 6th. They have two playgrounds, one is for grades 1-3 and the other one is grades 4-6. The teachers are good too. Then there's the Jr. Sr. High school which goes from grades 7-12. This school has good teachers and a nice school. The school consists of about 200 kids. They have many different classes for the kids to choose from and after school they can go to the Namo Weto Youth Center (Teen Center) to do homework or just hang out. They have things like board games, pool, air hockey, ping pong, video games, and computers. This island is very safe for all kids because they are on an island where only certain people can come. Because of this, kids can basically go anywhere without parental supervision. Most kids go to the movies every Saturday or go to the teen center on the weekends. This is where I lived for the past four years. Thanks for reading!

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