A technology integration project that was recently completed in 8th grade Art was claymation stop motion videos. This is when you turn a succession of individual still images into a movie by stitching them together and playing them at high speed. For this project the students’ ideas (brainstormed and sketched out in a storyboard) had to be based around using clay models that could be moved a tiny bit at a time, as well as their own drawing skills and any other appropriate props such as cardboard, paper, etc.
To start with we discussed the workflow for creating these ideas into a finished movie, including setting up their workspace, using a MacBook cameras and Photo Booth to take the images and how much movement should be added with each new image (the focus here was getting the students to realize how many still images they would need to take even for just a 30-second film).
Once they had completed the filming we then looked at how to get the images into iMovie, how to remove the automatic Ken Burns effect that iMovie adds and changing the clip length for each image to less than a second. They then added some basic editing effects including titles, transitions and a background music track. The final piece was then to present their finished movies to the entire Middle School during morning meeting.
The completed films can all be seen below as well as a few shots of the class filming in the art studio:
