This trimester, the Digital Arts, Visual Arts, and Ceramics Electives all worked together to create short claymation movies. First, the Digital Arts students created storyboards and treatments for their movies. They wrote descriptions of the characters, props, and backdrops needed. Then they met with the students from the Visual Arts and Ceramics Electives.

Digital Arts students showed the other two electives what they needed, and the other two electives told the Digital Arts students what they could create. The Digital Arts students, in the meanwhile, gathered sound effects and created voice-overs for the videos. After the props, backdrops, and characters had been created, the Digital Arts elective started shooting. They used their iPads to shoot all the video, one frame at a time, using only the Camera App. Then they sent the still images to iMovie on MacBook Airs. The technical challenge here was sending images to the laptops from the iPads, especially since they were sending hundreds of photos per scene. Image Capture on the laptops helped make this process fast and easy. In iMovie, they added the sound effects, voice-overs, titles, and credits. They carefully edited out any images that had hands in them (from moving the clay characters). And finally, they exported the movie.

On November 19, we invited the community to come view our four finished movies at the Arts Elective Showcase. Our claymation films represent lots of time and planning on behalf of all the teachers and students involved. We are looking forward to next year’s showcase already.

Here are three of the films: