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!