Clay Animation Rflection Essay

In social studies this year for first quarter we had to do a stop frame animation. Our animation was on an explorer. My explorer was Vasco Nunez de Balboa. In this project there were some ups and downs. There were some things I had fun doing like making the clay people, and some things that were hard like doing all of the computer things, and just spacing out our time wisely. At the beginning of this project I thought it was going to be easy, but I was wrong.

To me the part of this project that was the most fun was making the clay people, and working with Linden. I really enjoyed being creative with making the little people. It was fun mixing the colors, and putting them together. I liked seeing what the people looked like once they were all done. I think the clay animation project was much more fun than if we would have had to just write a report. I also liked being able to work on this project with a friend. It made the project extra fun.

I think the hardest part of this project was shooting the scenes, and putting it all together on the computer. When we were shooting the scenes the clay people would fall over or something. This was frustrating because we would have to put them back up and they would just fall over again. This made shooting the scenes longer than we had hoped. Also, all of the things we had to do on the computer were kind of hard. For example doing the audio was hard because we had to find the right distance away from the microphone, and talk clearly when we were doing the narration and dialog. It also took us a little bit of time to figure out how to use iMovie.

While doing this project I learned that I had to space my time out better. In the beginning I thought it would be easy to shoot a scene and put it on the computer in one day. I soon found out that that is not how it worked. It ended up taking one day for my partner and me to shoot a scene, and another to put it on the computer. It was then hard to turn the scene in on time because we hadn’t spaced our time well. I think if we would have known how to space our time in the beginning, we would have been better at spacing it throughout the project. I think this project helped me learn how to space my projects better, and I will use this knowledge now throughout the year.

In conclusion this project was fun and hard. I learned that I had to space my time out more wisely when doing a project like this. There were also difficult parts and fun parts to it. I really enjoyed making the clay people and working with Linden (who happens to be one of my best friends). The hard parts for me were shooting the scenes and putting everything together on the computer. Even though there were some difficult parts to this project, I would still do another one if I were offered too.