Claymation+with+IMovie

** Wendy Semsel, **  ES Computer Teacher [|Churchill School and Center]
 * Presenter: **
 * School: **


 * Description:** Create original claymations using photographs and Imovie. Storyboard with a slideshow program in computer class, create original artwork and take digital photographs in art class, then insert photographs into Imovie to animate. Can be used to bring stories to life from Language Arts classes, or illustrate ideas from Social Studies.


 * Ingredients:**

Time to plan and coordinate with teachers.

Time for students to complete project. We at planned for at least 2 months to complete a 1 1/2 page story. This of course depends on how much class time you have - we have them twice a week for computers and twice a week for art (45 minute classes).

iMovie program on I Mac computers with a decent speed and memory capacity. We have a 1 G capacity on our server per student.

Digital camera. We used a nice SLR from Canon. Something to hold sets and camera still and constant.

Clay - model magic.

Materials for background - markers, paint, fabric, cardboard, construction paper.

NOTES

Things that changed: When Wendy did story projects in past years, each kid has picked their own story and drawn a few scenes from it and did voiceovers with a slideshow program. Because this project is a little more ambitious, and has many moving pieces, we decided to make each class a “production studio”, with each kid having separate jobs to work towards one story that they had voted on.

Once the kids have taken the pictures, they can team up or go it alone to add sound effects in iMovie.

2. To make model building easier, we decided to photograph from above. But then you can’t use a tripod, so we had to build a special box to hold the camera, and guides for the paper background.

3. We thought scale was going to be an issue - but really you can make sets/clay figures whatever size you want, as long as you are consistent with size.

4. I could not have all of the classes break the story up into scenes, as it would have been too much language for some groups, so we just broke them into 2 groups, one decided on characters we needed to make, and one decided on the scenery. I broke the scenes up for them into a slideshow.

5. We had to do a dry run to see if it would actually work - and also to show them to really get an idea of what they are doing. You can also show videos like Wallace and Gromit, which many are familiar with, but that is a standard you won’t be reaching for and some might get frustrated that theirs do not look at good!

6. We thought we would finish with all photography in art class before we started in computer class. For the longer story, we ended up taking some pictures, then going to computer class to see what it looked like, and then going back to art class and taking more pictures, and going back to computer class...

7. Some people have said “Why don’t you just go out and buy some of that fancy stop motion software like iStopMotion?”. We have iMovie already, and we don’t have fifty bucks for each license of iStopMotion. iMovie also does what I want it to do, so why buy a specialized piece of software when you can use iMovie for more than just claymation?

A simple organizer we used in Art class:

Art class jobs:

clay sculptors:__________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________

background artists: ______________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________________________________

animators:_____________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________________________________