The Surprise: Claymation, English Lessons, and Surprising Myself

During the 2007-08 school year, I worked with fifth graders at Fallon Park Elementary School for an hour each Wednesday as a guest artist. My residency was organized by The Arts Council of the Blue Ridge in coordination with the school’s 21st Century Learning Center Program.

At the start of my residency, I attempted to teach the students to make a live-action documentary. I thought they’d quickly pick up the basics of using a tripod, shot composition, and interview techniques. Certainly, the students I worked with were bright, enthusiastic, and eager to make a movie. What I didn’t count on is that English was my students’ second language and even having a discussion about what a documentary is was both a linguistic and conceptual challenge.

Three weeks into the residency, I realized that our documentary (we had started shooting footage and interviewing students in an after school dance class) would not be one we could finish in short, hour-long sessions, even if we had the rest of the school year to do it.Reaching deep into my bag of tricks and somewhat beyond my area of expertise, I found an idea: claymation!

After all, it wasn’t the technology that I really want to teach but instead the storytelling. Taking just a few of the technical aspects out of the picture, I was able to pare down the class to something they could handle. The new class design gave the students fun, easy tasks that could be worked in to one-hour sessions. The basic elements of the class became:

• sculpting clay creatures with modeling clay
• designing and creating a diorama set
• outlining a plot and story idea
• taking still photographs with a camera on a tripod
• giving voice to their characters using voiceover
• creating a soundscape using the BBC’s sound effects library
• adding titles and effects to the footage (after I imported and cleaned up some of the stills).

Soon after switching to clay, I noticed a big changes in the classroom. My students’ vocabulary was growing by leaps and bounds, even the most timid of students was bubbling over with ideas during group discussions about plot and dialogue, and I found myself not wanting to miss a week’s class, not even for vacation.

What stunned me the most was learning they missed me too: I came back from an conference trip to three hand-drawn “thank you” cards from my students. My next week back in class, I was greeted with, “Miss Ashley, I miss you so much! It’s been forever since we have class!”

Our final class was bittersweet. I gave each student a new, unopened back of clay, a book about drawing animals, and a DVD of their finished film. Together we watched our finished work on the school’s biggest television and I smiled and nodded as they told me about their next big movie.

If you’re a filmmaker looking to learn to create (or how to teach) claymation or simple stop-motion animation, you’ll definitely want to check out this site.