Inspiring Scratch Project!

As rats are my favorite animals, I just had to type "rats" into the search function to see what Scratch had to offer in the way of rodents. I was delighted to find a rat maker and dress-up game by LiljatupsuLilytuft. Not only can you change the rat's coloring, fur pattern, ears, eyes, and tail, but you can also dress it up in a cute, warm winter outfit. What's not to like? I used to love dress-up games when I was a kid, so I was excited to learn that I could make my own on Scratch.

Reading Takeaways

Image Credit: Olga Tutunaru on Unsplash

Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom by Sylvia Libow Martinez & Gary S. Stager
Growing up, I always felt I learned better when I got to do something with my hands. I think this is true for most people, but hands-on and experiential learning is not always applied in the classroom, despite what philosophers speculated and research has supported. I think this is one reason art class can be an escape for some students: they finally get the chance to try something themselves rather than just listen to a lecture or read about it. Art lessons can become especially interesting when students get the opportunity to engage with a technology that feels new or unfamiliar to them. The process of feeling and trial and error promotes problem-solving, creativity, and deeper understanding in learners and is self-rewarding. When you combine Papert’s “Constructionism” with Dewey’s ideas of reflection and meaning-making, you open the possibility for students to learn not just the technology but also about themselves, other subjects/topics, and the world around them; in fact, encouraging meaning-making and reflection helps the practical or technical skills students learned to stick with them.

Frame-by-Frame Stop Motion: The Guide to Non-Puppet Photographic Animation Techniques
Prior to reading this, I had no understanding of where stop-motion originated. It makes so much sense that stop motion evolved from early filmmakers and creatives like Georges Méliès, who experimented with practical effects. The animation lesson plan I made last week combined sound composition with stop-motion animation. Now I can imagine more ways stop-motion animation (which is way more broad than I realized with different forms such as: puppet animation, pixilation, time-lapse photography, and downshooting or cutout animation) can be combined with other materials and practices, like filmmaking, to create something unique that opens students up to a larger range of creative possibilities for self-expression.

Stop Motion Animation

Connoisseur Caterpillar

Sound effects sourced from Pixabay:

freesound_community, “042276_AMB_celery-chewing-01.wav”;

freesound_community, “3_tone_chime”;

Roman_Sol, “Magical Transformation SFX (Short).”

This week was kind of crazy, and I think this claymation reflects that. Over the weekend, much of the Art and Art Ed dept at TC, including myself, attended Conversations Across Cultures, a one-credit required symposium. During the workshops, we focused on developing and understanding our artistic processes through embodied explorations involving ourselves and different materials, much like Judy Burton's Processes and Structures course! The experience was so involved that it permeated into my assignment for New Media New Forms, becoming the background material for my claymation. 

I struggled to come up with an idea or concept for my stop motion. "Serious play", abstract lines and shapes, and sensory exploration are all that my drained brain could think of. Well, that, and... worms, for some reason (maybe I'm longing for spring). I thought back to the stop motions I've made in the past. In middle school, I used to make stop motions with my dolls. I recall enjoying experimenting with their movements and frame rates to create something smooth and realistic. In high school, I took an animation class, where our final assignment was to create a claymation. I remember again being focused on the movement of the objects and having a lot of fun making something silly with clay. Thus, my green clay worm, caterpillar thing was born. I'm a little too embarrassed to share my middle school stop motions, but this is my claymation from high school:

Where Does Your Food Come From?

It had been years since I made a stop motion, and I can't remember which programs I used, so I decided to try the free Stop Motion Studio App. I also used my iPhone camera, a small tripod, and CapCut to edit everything together. I don't have photos of my work set up, but I did make some test claymations to experiment with the background materials and how to move my little worm guy. Below are just two of them!

Test 1:

Test 2:

Overall, I really loved this process, and I wish I had had more time to work on it. I think stop motion is ripe with possibilities for the classroom! Not only is it wonderful on its own, but it also pairs well with sound composition experimentation and material exploration. It is the perfect bridge between digital, physical, and audio-visual!