Henry Hudson Claymation

In all of first quarter and in the beginning of second quarter, I've been working on a European Explorer Claymation. My partner was Jenna. A claymation is where you take a lot of pictures, put them together on iMovie, and it comes out looking like a movie. You have to move each clay person, or thing, in the slightest bit, otherwise if you move it too much, it doesnt come out smooth like a movie. In movies like "Chicken Run" you would notice that the characters are made of clay. That movie is a claymation. When you're professionally making a clay mation, you have to have new clay characters for every slightist movement, but when you're making a claymation for you're Social Studies class, it doesn't have to be as precise.

The parts I liked the most about making our claymation was that we had everyday to work on it, instead of having to do the project at home. I also liked doing the dialogue because there was a lot of voices to do and we had to do some man voices. In the second scene, Jenna couldn't do a man voice because her voice is to high, so we just used our normal voices. It was also fun doing the dialogue because if Jenna wouldn't be there one day, I would have to do the voices my self, or get someone else to it with me. I also liked moving the little clay people because you could move them how ever you wanted and make them do what you wanted. Putting all the pictures on iMovie was fun because, even though we would have to re-set all the times on every picture, we could play the scene and it would look really cool. Putting the ending credits together was fun because we got to play music on it. I want to do "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey, but I cant do it for sure right now because Jenna isn't here. I hope she likes the song because it looks and sounds really good with our ending credits.

The hardest part of this claymation was figuring out what we needed to do for our scenes. We had to take a lot of thinking time into what we were gonna do for each scene. If we had a scene wrong, we would have to start over and then we would be behind on the project. It was really hard if Jenna and I got behind because we have soccer practice after school and on Tuesdays and Thursdays we have games so we can't always catch up after school. Figuring out what we were going to say for dialogue and narration was kind of hard because we didn't always know what to say for each character. It was also difficult trying to time each picture on the right time because if it was too short the voice would go into the next scene. If it was too long, then we would have to spend the next 5 minutes trying to find the right time.

In this project I learned that it takes a long time and a lot of hard work to create something really good. I also learned that it takes partnership to finish something. If Jenna wasn't my partner, it would have been really hard for me to finish our claymation. I learned that it takes patience if you want your claymation to turn out right. If you don't have patience, then you get into a big jumbled mess and don't know what to do. I learned that if you don't get a scene done by the time it's due, then you get docked points for not trying hard enough, or someone deleted your work and you have to start all over. I also learned that if you DON'T save your work to the server on your computer, someone could easily delete all you progress and then you have to start over and you get really behind, and then your behind for the rest of the project, pretty much. If your partner wouldn't be there one day, you have to work extra hard and fast because you want to get your scene in when it's due.

This project wasn't really that hard in the beginning because you just had in to start working. This project taught me a lot, and I won't forget everything I have learned. In the future this project will probably help me if we have another similar project. I hope we have another project like this claymation in High School because I had a lot of fun working on this. Although I'm kind of sad it's over, I'm happy we don't have to stress this any more.