ESSAYYY

Taylor Donahew
American Studies
November 8, 2007


Stop-Frame Clay Animation Reflection Essay


We have just finished our stop frame animations in American Studies. It was a clay, stop-frame animation based on the story of a famous European explorer. Amanda and I did our stop-frame project on Amerigo Vespucci. After a lot of time spent in class, we have completed this project. We will now be uploading them to You Tube.

The fun part of this project was generally doing the clay animations. I really enjoyed making the clay figures. It was also fun snapping the photos. That was fun because it took very little effort. All that you had to do was press the silver button.
I also liked doing the audio. Amanda and I got very creative and somewhat humorous.

The most difficult parts were the fun parts. Even with the camera, it wasn’t always easy. Before Amanda and I knew to set down the camera when taking pictures,
We had some difficulty. The pictures would turn out jumpy or out of place. Sometimes we would have to start scenes over. Also, the room had terrible lighting, so most of our pictures were very shot out. We also had little difficulty with the audio. There were few
occasions when we would have to stop and wait for the background noise to clear. That wasn’t a very major setback though.

The most important thing I learned was computer skills. I had to learn a lot about
animation and doing everything on a computer. I recall at the beginning of the project
we did an animation with the boat sailing across the map. I had absolutely NO CLUE
what I was doing, and became very dependent on help from teachers. I look back on that
and laugh because it was such a simple thing and I did end up learning how to do it. In fact, I could do it over and over and never miss a step of the process. I also learned how to do a clay animation. I never before thought I would EVER be able to do that. Now I
think they are very fun and would do one again for another project.

In conclusion, this was a fun project. It was entertaining in almost every aspect of
this project. I learned a lot about Amerigo Vespucci. I also still had fun doing it.
I had a good time working with art, technology, and history combined into a single subject. The idea of a clay animation as a project was a great idea. I hope we can do something like this again in the future. I hope you see my video on You Tube.

---Taylor Donahew---