This is not a reflection on the meaning of life. I wrote that as a catchy title. Instead, I will write about a claymation I did in class with my friend Lilliana. A claymation is a video produced by taking pictures of clay in different poses and playing them so the clay appears to be moving. You can see my movie above. If you haven't, break out the popcorn and enjoy. If you have, continue reading.
The most pleasurable part of this project, for me, was the outlining of the scenes. You see, we had a large piece of construction paper divded into a three by three grid. Each panel was reserved for either the title page, the scenes or the credits. We would draw a picture representing each scene with a box below for dialogue and narration. The talking would be added later on. The reason why I enjoyed this section so much was because there wasn't wierd glitchy things happening everytime you turned your back. There had to be five lines of narrationa and five lines of dialouge for every scene. We also got to make most of the jokes in this section, which made it pretty enjoyable. We even had the "Hand of God" in there, but that had to be revised. All in all it was a very nice experience.
The least pleasurable experience for me was the filming itself. Our camera was difficult to work with because it did not have very much memory. In fact, it died a couple of times! We also had to constantly make and remake new pieces, because we kept on running out of clay. Often times, the thing that looked good on paper wasn't so good in practice. A lot of the time I was stuck with camera shooting which I didn't like very much. It was a very boring job to take almost the same picture over and over. The clay left a thin residue on our hands, upsetting Mr. Snelling, our tech over seer. He was worried it would get all over the table. Clay and tech hardware do not get along.
I learned many important things during this claymation, but I think the most important thing was how to learn to work with people you don't know very well. To tell you the truth, I didn't know Lilliana's name! It was very strange. I was expecting to do the report with Adam Baesler, due to the fact he asked to be my partner and I agreed. Lilliana and I had a hard time cooperating at first, but at the end we were a well oiled machine. The other thing I learned was to be nicer to other people. Doing this project gave me a feeling of knowing what the other people were doing. I realized that I was just as good as them when it came to making a video. So, I tried to be nicer to everyone. So I think this project a better person.
This was a fun project that I liked very much. Thank you for reading this, and I hope it changed your life. If it didn't, I understand. Still, I hope you liked it.
