Reflection to Project 2

I thought that our presentation of Claymation went well. We pre-made our little worm creature so it would be quicker to animate and demonstrate in class. One think that I might have actually included more of was the background information such as history. It would have been interesting if we had had more time to talk about when the first claymations were made, who coined the phrase "claymation" being that it is simply an extension of stop-motion animation.  Sara and I just started playing with the clay and that is where we came up with the little worm guy and eating the egg. We had originally wanted to do something a little more complex but with the time limit, it had to be sized down.

After doing claymation and having an actual feeling for how much time it takes just to get 30 seconds of animation, I have a higher respect for the animators and artist that do this. I cannot really phantom making a feature length film of claymation. I think I would probably go crazy, maybe if I had nothing else to do I might think it kind of therapeutic. But Just trying to think of how much time and care they take to make it perfect and the actions so smooth.

Some problems that happened that are important to take note of for future experiments with claymation:
~The clay left a trail of color as it moved across the "stage", which wasn't necessary a bad thing for this project. But I could see that it might be a problem in a more expanded piece
~When watching the movie, you can tell that the camera moved ever so little but it made a big difference in the final piece. Our movie looks homemade because of this little camera giggle. Coming up with a way (maybe using a better tripod) to keep the camera in one place even if it has been bumped or even pushing the button to take a picture.
~Note really knowing the clay that much and having the colors mix when we didn't really want to didn't really work out to well. We worked with the blue and than we worked with the red, when looking closely at the creature you can see little blue marks. This is a problem because it gives it a dirty feel.
~Need to make sure the movement changes in between each frame need to be small. A movement with a large change in placement also makes to image jump in scattered.

Thoughts about doing this as an activity with Children:
If given a long amount of time to work on a claymation with children, it would be fun to allow them to design and build there own creatures. It will also be possible to allow them to storyboard out what they would like for their creature to do. Doing the animation as a whole group or whole class. Individual animations wouldn't really work very well for one person instructing the process. If there wasn't a lot of time to work with the children, it would be good to create a creature, storyboard and backgrounds for the children. These actions will allow for you to teach them how to actually animate the creature.