Stop-frame explorer animation

Austin Baker
American Studies
November 7, 2007


Animation Reflection Essay

My explorer stop-frame animation was on Hernando Cortes. The partner I did this project with was Harrison Price. When I first heard that we were doing a stop-frame animation I thought it was going to be a good project. It took a long time to complete but it was fun doing. Many things about this project were hard and I have learned a lot of things about explorers and how to do your projects well.

During the making of the animation there were many hard parts like getting started and keeping up with what you had. Before we started pictures we had days where it was hard to try to plan on what to film. Most of the time we didn’t have the right clay to make our project look better. For some days I couldn’t work on the project due to away games for football and other things. My partner Harrison did a great job of keeping everything set and together for days when I was gone. One of the harder parts were getting things done before their due dates, with many scenes needed to get done in a certain amount of time things got difficult. The slowest part of the project besides making all of our props was uploading/importing the pictures we had taken of them. Some times when we finished importing our pictures they would end up backwards and we would have to rearrange about 30+ pictures.

Even though frustrating at times, this project turned out to be really fun. I have to say the best part was making things from clay and making props. At first it was tricky to make our clay people because all we had were unusual colors to make bodies out of like green and orange. Later we got some skin-colored clay and used paper clips to hold body parts like arms together. For one of our scenes our characters needed to be filmed on a boat, the problem was we didn’t have one. We ended up using a brown sheet of paper with blue in front of it and a camera level to the ground to make it look like they were doing things on the boat. Another fun part was that it was a social project. Sometimes I would get off track to mess with people and that is when I would get in trouble. After being told to do my work I tried harder to get the project done and have fun later.

Through this project I have learned many things that should help me with later projects. One thing you could not do during this project was to procrastinate. If you did you would find that the due date was tomorrow and that you still needed to make a couple more scenes. As I look back at it I know that Harrison was more focused than I was on getting the project done and I know now that I should be the same way. During the week that the project was due we had a lot of scenes due and I had two away football games. Even though I was gone for two days we still finished in good time because Harrison stayed after school a day when I had wrestling and finished it up. I am glad that I had such a good partner because that helped me stayed focused more than usually. At last I learned to always do what you need done before you start messing around, that way you will have extra time at the end to socialize.

This is one of the best projects I have had to do for a class in a long time and wasn’t as stressful as some of the other large projects that we get. Most of the time doing this project was fun like when we were messing with clay and talking to people during it. Other times this project was hard and frustrating because there were things that some times interfered with it. After doing this claymation I have learned many things like keeping on track and getting things done. I really enjoyed this project and have had fun doing it.