The “Pitches” for Stopmotion Movies

I am hoping to end our school year on a creative note, launching a unit around Figurative Language through Stopmotion movies. My students are right in the starting stages. They have been given a Figurative Language term and now are working on a story idea around that term.

Yesterday, I had them working on a “movie pitch.” I told them to imagine that I had a few million dollars handy (as  if …) and am ready to invest in a good movie idea. Their task was to convince me of their idea through the writing of a “pitch.” They had to submit their “pitches” at our weblog site as a way of sharing out their ideas.

Here are a few intriguing ones:

• Our figurative language is personification. In our movie we are going to have Oreo’s talking. One is saying that Oreo’s are Milks favorite cookie. Then another one says that milk doesn’t have feelings so they can’t have feelings. And that’s personification.
• Our movie pitch is an idiom. Our idea uses the idiom “Against the clock”. We plan to make our film about a kid who is last at taking a test and his teacher tells him he is going against the clock. So he starts daydreaming about a cheetah clock and him running in a race. Then his teacher tells him that what she said was just a idiom and he has to hurry up he feels relieved that he doesn’t have to race anyone so he finishes and gets a A on the test!
• This movie has alliteration in it. It starts off with two turtles walking on a trail. A person watching says an alliteration sentence involving the two turtles. Another person asks what he’s saying. The person then explains alliteration to the other person and walks away.
• Our movie is about personification. In our movie there are going to be two people talking about the wind and giving it characteristics. After, another character will appear and ask them why they are giving human like characteristics to the wind. The two characters will then explain what they are saying and what personification is.
• Our movie is about personification. There are going to be two kids talking,about the wind, giving it human-like characteristics. Then another character is going to ask them what they mean when they give the wind the human-like characteristics. After the two characters are going to explain what personification is.
• The figure of speech we got was Hyperbole. We are making a spoof on Free Willy. We are thinking of when Willy gets freed we would have Willy jump on a jet ski or into a random taxi. It is a hyperbole because we are stretching the truth by having him jump in a vehicle as he’s leaving, like a fairy tale.
• Our movie is about Imagery. We are focusing on a doctor’s office of terror. The main character is going to the doctor’s office and needs to face the cold, hard stethoscope. He starts to have a nervous breakdown from the sights and smells of the doctor’s office. In the end, he has a great appointment and gets a lollipop, which will get him a trip to the dentist. And that’s another story …
• Our movie is an Onomatopoeia. We plan to have a family of 5 that live in Southampton. The 3 kids are triplets named Nathan, John, and Alex. For the special occasion of the triplets birthday the parents take them to I Hop in Philadelphia. Alex orders a banana pancake in the I Hop when suddenly it rolls out of the restaurant. Alex and his family run outside curious of the pancake and see it as transformed to a giant ninja pancake that shouts rawr! The family starts to see sounds in words around Philadelphia and have to stop the banana pancake before it terrorizes our beloved Philadelphia.

Today, I will show them how to use our webcams and the Stopmotion Animator freeware and let them play around. Playing is a crucial part of this project at this stage. I want them to become comfortable with creating scenes in stopmotion.

Later, we intend to publish some of the best of the movies over at the Longfellow Ten website. If you haven’t checked that site out, do it. It’s a collection of student-created stopmotion movies.

And if you are interested in stopmotion, I have a website resource that I created with all sorts of resources. It’s called Making Stopmotion Movies (very creative, eh?)

Peace (in the frames),
Kevin