I’ve been invited to be a presenter at what could be a very interesting session at the National Writing Project‘s Annual Meeting in November down in Orlando. NWP is teaming up with MAKE Magazine to offer a session on technical writing and Do-It-Yourself exploration.
Here’s the blurb from the three-hour working session called NWP Makes! Making and Technical Writing (which I see is now completely full):
A special Saturday event hosted by the NWP Digital Is project’s partnership with Make magazine. Participants will be invited to explore the connections between making and technical writing through hands-on projects and shared reflection. Come to learn about the making/crafting/tinkering/DIY movement and explore connections to your own practice.
I’ve been asked to do a one-hour session on stopmotion moviemaking. After my small group makes their movie, their task is going to be to document what we did in technical, expository writing. So, they experience it and then explain it for others.
Yesterday, I used some wiki stix (actually, they were knock-off stix and were a pain to use — note to self for workshop: get the real ones) and made a prototype movie that also became a teaser of sorts for the NWP Makes! session. I was trying to make the dude talk (I used Audacity to change my voice) and that is hard to do, I found out!
Right now, I am trying to come with “story” scenarios for 10 people to make a movie around in an hour. An hour is not long when you are shooting frame by frame. I have some ideas, though.
Peace (on the make),
Kevin
PS — If you are interested in stopmotion animation, I created a website with hints for teachers and students. Go to Making Stopmotion Movies.
This is pretty neat: the world’s smallest (so they say) stopmotion movie made with a tiny microscope attachment to a mobile phone’s camera. The movie is called Dot, and there is a behind-the-scenes video of the making of the movie, too. I love when they do that. The character of Dot is just 9 millimeters tall. She’s tiny!
I’ve used Animoto many times in many ways over the last few years to showcase work of my students, but I had not yet tried the ability to upload videos into Animoto, and create moving project. Our recent name movies seemed a perfect fit, since Animoto only allows for small chunks of video (I think it is about 20 seconds) which you can edit down to smaller pieces at the site itself. The process was fairly intuitive.
I guess if you had a larger video, you could upload it and then duplicate it a bunch of times, editing different moments to create something a little different. Seems like a lot of work, but it could be done.
I like this new theme they have at Animoto. The folding boxes seemed a nice design fit for a movie of stickfigures.
I like to start the first day of school with some fun technology and last year, I had my sixth graders jump headfirst into Pivot Stickfigure to make a movie that included letters in their name. I love that when parents ask “what did you do today,” they can answer, “we made a movie.”
Their only instructions from me are that I want them to include the letters of their name in their short stopmotion movie. What am I looking for? Time to chat with my new students and a sense of who is pretty comfortable with the computers and with trying something new (only one of my students had used Pivot before). I smiled when I heard a boy shout out from the back of the room, “I’m the expert. I can help.”
That’s what I want to hear!
I then grabbed finished movies (a few are still in process) and put them together into longer collections.
My little guy (five years old) asked yesterday if “I could make a movie” with the clay he has been working with. I’ve had clay all over the place for the past week or so and he has been making little characters and stuff, and then storing them in a box that he created. It’s very cute. And he’s been watching his older brother film some sort of epic stopmotion movie (I’m not sure what he’s doing — he has his studio set up in his bedroom) that involves paper cutouts (his favorite technique).
You want to make a movie, too? Sure.
I set up the Mac, turned on iStopmotion and let him make his movie (I helped here and there with the computer and did the final version in iMovie with music, but he did everything else himself.)
The movie is called “Chase Revenge” and that’s a King and a Queen being searched for by their dog, and a farmer, and they united and live happily ever after.
(A quick sample done in minutes with iStopmotion2)
I took my classroom Mac home with me this summer and am trying out some new things with it. I do love the Mac now (Bonnie will be proud) and I wondered about making stopmotion movies on it. I know you can import digital photos into iPhoto or iMovie, and do it that way by laying in images. But I wondered about programs for the Mac, so I gave iStopmotion2 by Boinx a try.
I am pretty impressed with the possibilities of this software. It’s easy to use, creates files that pretty much seamlessly integrate with iMovie, where you can add voice and music and titles, etc. If you have an upgraded version of iStopmotion, you can add audio and titles and more right in the program itself. (I would not recommend this for the classroom because of the cost of the licensing. But if you have deep pockets, well, it would be perfect for kids to use because it is just so darn easy to use).
I did splurge on a home license because I figure my own kids will give it a shot. They liked using the foregrounds and backgrounds, but I guess those features don’t export with the video. Or at least, I can’t figure it out. Or it may be that my license does not allow it.
What I need to now figure out is how to use something other than the tiny video camera in my Mac to capture frames because the location of that camera (on the top of the laptop) limits what we can do. And my five year old says he wants to make a movie! So …
Yesterday, all of my students watched a DVD of our short stopmotion movies that were created around themes of Figurative Language. Well, not all. A few of the movies are still not done, but another teacher has the laptops for a stretch, and I am not even sure if those uncomplete projects will get done before the school year ends on us.
Not one of my students had ever tried to make a stopmotion movie before, so this was new territory for all of them.
I’ve been thinking about the project and had some reflections about what worked and what didn’t work.
Completely Hooked and Completely Engaged: There is no doubt in my mind that bringing moviemaking, including stopmotion, into the classroom is a huge hit with most students. During the two week stretch — from storyboarding to editing — almost every single student was fully engaged in what they were doing. They were jazzed about making a movie and they rushed into the classroom every day, wanting to get started. You can’t beat that kind of enthusiasm.
It Pays to Have a Theme: Each group was given a term of Figurative Language, and their film was supposed to reflect that term. One year, I gave a lot of latitude to what they could film and it was a near disaster. Chaos and infighting ensued. While I stepped aside most of the time with this project, I was definitely the teacher at the start, assigning the basis theme of the movie. This gave structure to the project, and of course, made it a learning experience as much as a movie-making experience.
Prep Pays Off: I had my students brainstorm story ideas and then create a “movie pitch” for me to look over. Then, they had to use a storyboard to map out their story. This was all done before the computers were even turned on because once the power button is pushed, they are off to the races.
Mentor Movies: We watched some Wallace and Gromit shorts (including a behind the scenes video), and also a documentary around stopmotion movies. While this took time away from the project, it was invaluable for talking about the effort and patience that goes into stopmotion. They were amazed at the scale of things — how small the sets were and how patient the filmmakers were. I preached that patience every day. But for some 12 year olds, that word doesn’t always register.
First, Pivot: I had then using Pivot Stickfigure for a class period. This simple program is great for introducing the concept of “frames” of stopmotion. You can literally see the movie unfold along the stop of the screen. Kids love Pivot, too. What I noticed is they learned to slow down the movements of characters, which then translates into smoother actions. Pivot allowed them time to experiment a bit because if you make a mistake, it is easy enough to fix.
No Scripts, Bad Move (for some): I looked at the calendar and counted the days that I would have the laptops in my head and realized that I needed to push things along. I made the decision to allow groups to use the storyboard as a script and not write out dialogue. I’m not sure this was a good decision, as some of the movies became slightly incoherent and just a jumble of footage, as opposed to a story. I think the script would have helped provide a framework for the narration of voices. I’m second-guessing myself on this one.
Corrupt Files: This was frustrating and I think it is a result of our laptops now getting older and not working as well as they once did. Some groups spent a long time shooting a scene, saved the raw footage and then … the video file became corrupt. For the most part, I was pretty amazed at how well they took it (no one threw the computer out the window). They would sigh, shrug and get back to work re-filming the scene. I think my students are more resilient than I would be in the same circumstances.
Wiki Stix Rock: In years past, I have used clay with students to create characters. Honestly, it gets messy with 80 students and the clean-up time takes away from the filming time. This year, I went with Wiki Stix — little bendable sticks — and they were a huge hit. A lot of groups brought in props, too, but they loved the wiki stix. And I loved that there was no mess! Plus, the size of the wiki stix were perfectly scaled for the frame of the stopmotion movie.
Staying on Topic: I mentioned how every group had a figurative language theme. Not every group was successful in keeping on topic, and there are a few movies (all from groups of boys) that make no sense at all. I tried to get around to help as many groups as I could, but as one teacher in a room of up to 10 different projects going on at once, I was not always able to get everywhere, all the time. And some groups nodded their heads when I came to help them and then continued what they were doing as if I had not even been there. The strange thing is that even as we watched them on the DVD, these group members continued to think that their movies were clearly the top of the crop, even as peers were asking “what was that about?”
Ungraded Project: Partially because this was an end-of-year project and partially because assessing moviemaking is difficult, I decided that this would not be a graded project. I never told my students this and only one student (out of 80) even bothered to ask if they would be graded. I wonder now, though, about those groups who could not find focus and whether the grade incentive would have kept them better on track. Perhaps not. But, after we watched the DVD yesterday, I asked a few questions about figurative language and they mostly had a good understanding of their own term (from their own movie) and terms shown in other movies. So, that works for me. (Plus, there is no line on our new standards-based progress report for “making movies.”)
Girls versus Boys: This is an observation across a few years of experience. Girls stay much more on task with this project and are more likely to start over if something doesn’t go right than boys are. Boys rush things and are easily wowed by some cool effect. Boys are more likely to try something new — like holding the camera at odd angles — and then they live with that in their movie, even if it doesn’t help the story. Girls are all about the story, and they patiently construct the movie around the story. I think, too, that in this project, the groups of girls were more attuned that their movie might get a world-wide audience (via our blog and Longfellow 10) while the boys were more interested in impressing the friends in the room. The result? The girls’ movies are more refined than the boys’ movies, and that is pretty much across every single class. It’s interesting.
If you want to learn more about stopmotion, I created the Making Stopmotion Movie site to help teachers. And some of our movies are being published over at The Longfellow 10 collaborative website. If your class makes movies, you are invited to join us at the LF10.
Yesterday, the real deadline for my students to complete their Figurative Language Stopmotion Movies came and most (alas, not all) of the groups finished up, some in a big hurry. I’ll be reflecting a bit as a teacher on the project another day this week, but I thought I might share one or two of the short movies with you. Over the next week or so, I’ll be posting a handful at the collective Longfellow 10 site.
Some of my student groups are nearing completion of their stopmotion movie projects. I was out the other day, which puts a wrench in the timeline because a sub can’t do technical support, so progress is slow. Still, most are working on creating soundtrack music and then the next step is pulling it all together. Friday is our deadline. That’s tomorrow. Yikes.
Here are a few scenes from three movies that were completed.
There’s a lot of work being done on our stopmotion movies, particularly now that I set a deadline of next Friday for completion. Yesterday, I presented as mini-lesson around using Moviemaker, including making titles and credits (use restraint, I told them), adding narration and cutting into video to remove unwanted hands from scenes.
I went through and randomly grabbed some of the raw footage so that I could share out some of the work at our class website. It’s always good to give parents a glimpse into the room (I wish my own sons’ teachers would do that once in a while).
Note: these are short movies built around concepts of figurative language.