2100 continued...

On the edge of the city, there was this boy called Timmy. He lived near the river, in a little shack covered in rotting moss. He lived with his mom, and he often would go fish by the river. Not today. Today, they were packing up. Timmy did not know although he heard his mom say" they're coming to take the house." He didn't know why they would, but if he wasn't only eight years old, he would understand that the new government had more taxes, and that paying them was extremely hard. So, they packed everything they had, which wasn't much, but was very valuable to the small family. They took their old bikes, and followed the river until they came to a motel. The mother paid for a room, and they entered a small apartment, where they went to sleep...

Meanwhile, Anfernee was telling Jack about having cramps. How could this be? They talked about it, and when Anfernee arrived at his house, he was going to tell his family what had happened. When he got inside, he found his family, which included his mom, dad and little sister. What he saw though, made him realize that his cramps weren't normal..

2100 continued..

Anfernee was walking down the street. He was talking to his best friend, Jack, about how fun they had that day. They enjoyed talking about how they made fun of the government, how they did a project on saving the bees, and their lives in general. Everyday this happened, they would wake up, go to school and come home. Nothing ever changed. But today was different. Anfernee had stomach pains. But how could this happen? Nobody ever got sick. Not in the confederacy, anyway.

Mt. Pilchuck Video

Juan Ponce De Leon Claymation

Claymation is using clay for animation. Movie Companies often use Claymation to create series, like the show Wallace and Grommet. Daniel, Couran and I used claymation to create a humorous documentary on the explorer Juan Ponce De Leon, which we recently completed in first quarter. Come visit into our story as I explain the production of the Claymation, and the fun, difficult and learning experiences of the production.

Making clay objects move is obviously fun. Why wouldn’t it be? But I would personally have to say that the making of the audio was the funnest part, which ironically, we had the least amount of time to do. The reason why it was fun was because I like to give objects “life”. Having just balls of clay moving around can be boring. Having music gives it suspense and gets you excited, and having voices tells the mood of the character, and tells you what kind of a person that little ball of clay is. We also tried to add humor in the voices, by saying either stupid or funny things.

Probably the most difficult or otherwise boring part of the project was at the beginning, when we were making the clay figures. It seemed really hard to make clothes for the figures. Also, our clay wasn’t very good, because it would never stick. Even after we made the basic shape of the people, we had trouble creating faces and bodily features. It was very time consuming. Once we got the figures done, they would still fall apart easily, causing more discomfort. We eventually finished.

Over the course of the project, I had many tidbits that I learned. The most important thing that I learned was to anchor our camera. As you can tell, the beginning of the video is very jumpy, and the animation doesn’t look good at all. Over time, we anchored our camera, and the quality greatly improved. I still think that we could have done better in some areas. That is not to say that it’s a bad movie, because I’m very happy with it. I’ll just make sure to keep the camera still for further Claymations, and to also take more pictures.

Claymation can be the easiest type of animation, and at the same time be the hardest and most time consuming. I had fun working with my partners, and I learned a lot by doing this project. I hope to experiment with maybe legos and fingers for future animations.