Category Archives: Adventures in StopMotion Animation

I attended an interesting presentation a few weeks ago by a colleague in my school district, John Heffernan, who shared out work he had done with one of his elementary students with Autism. Using Claymation Moviemaking and storytelling as the doorway, John helped this student make significant gains with social and emotional awareness of others, as well as becoming more connected to the larger school community.

As John told it, he and the special education teacher noticed that this student showed imagination and creativity one day when John shared some stopmotion software with the class. In fact, the teachers were so intrigued that they designed a year-long project in which John, the technology integration teacher, worked with the student regularly on claymation and stopmotion movies.

While the first films were rather sparse, as time went on, the short films, and then the scripts, began to show more emotional range for the characters in a claymation-filled imaginary world that this student began to create and construct, complete with back-stories and theme music. Audio narration added depth to characters. For a child with Autism, this emotional range represented significant progress, particularly using social cues (such as friendship or sadness) in the development of characters.

Later, the student presented his collection of stopmotion movies to his peers, calling on other students with questions and listening with some focus to the interactions of his audience. We watched videos of some of the claymation work, as well as observations of the presentation of movies in the classroom.

As John observed, the characteristic of Autistic children with hyper-intensive attention-to-detail helped with making stopmotion movies — the frame-by-frame shooting of footage is difficult, believe me — as did the malleability of clay characters. Plus, this student invented this entire imaginary world in his mind, which he then worked to bring to life, and to an audience, through movie-making.

I was impressed — with the filmmaking by the student and with the way that John and his teaching colleagues took time to notice the high level interest and then built an entire project for this student around claymation, with the higher goals of fostering more social and emotional growth over time. (John also brought stopmotion into the classroom for the peers, too, who were inspired by the work of this student and wanted to do their own.)

My only disappointment? We didn’t make our own claymation movies in the workshop session.

Peace (mold it, film it),
Kevin

(This is for the Slice of Life challenge for March, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We are writing each day about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

My son recently got an interesting gift: a Minecraft Stopmotion Movie package. Actually, the box contained the props and then you download the app, and use a mobile device to shoot the stopmotion. He and a friend were working on a short flick this long weekend.

While you could do all this without the package, the backgrounds and plastic bricks and characters make for an easier experience. (Although oddly, the intro and outros are preset to be pretty long … sometimes longer than the movie itself, and I wonder if this is a nod to kids’ fascination with those elements of moviemaking).

They are still working on how to tell a story in stopmotion as opposed to moving characters around just to move characters around … the teacher in me can’t stand the randomness. But I know I need to just let them do what they do, and play and explore.

I’ve shown him how to move the video into iMovie, where he can do more editing and add music, etc, so that is the next real step. He already knows the basics there, so it is a rather seamless transition from filmmaker to editor.

Peace (in the film),
Kevin