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!