Claymation Craziness

Jan 06, 2014 by Danny in Family

So this morning, was the first day after Christmas break. My son is still not in school every day, so he was home with me and we were wondering what to do. During breakfast, he starts to ask me if we can make a craft that he’d seen on TV, so after figuring that he was referring to Artzooka we decided to hit the computer to see what kind of “Makes” Jeremie had put online for us.

Although my son knew exactly which project he wanted to make, it quickly became apparent to me that I am not at all as well equipped to make crafts as Jeremie is. Although he does provide some great instruction. I’m just not as well stocked up on egg cartons, old socks, styrofoam, masking tape or buckets as I should be. Then I noticed a claymation project. We have Play-Doh and a camera! Unfortunately my son had no idea what claymation was, but after a quick intro to claymation videos on YouTube, he was totally in. A little too much so. He kept mumbling about spaceships and dragons and explosions of some sort.

So we grabbed our box of Play-Doh, a tripod and camera and headed off to make our movie. As my son selected the characters he wanted in the movie, I thought “why not add some Lego in the mix?”. As it turns out, we have lots of Play-Doh molds for animals, so a zoo seemed like a logical setting for our feature presentation. Between the two of us we built some trees, a ticket booth, and some enclosures out of Lego for our Play-Doh animals.

Lights, Camera… Action!

The stage was set, so it was time to settle on our screenplay. My son was still not really clear on how all this was going to go down, so he was a little ambitious and wanted to pull off some pretty fantastic stuff (mumbling of spaceships continues…). But I talked him down to something a little more tame for our first attempt at breaking into the movie industry. After walking him through a few frames and showing him the result on the camera, he got the hang of it and we were cooking with gas. It’s no Wallace and Gromit, but it’s not bad for a five year old and his old man playing in the kitchen for an hour.

Not having as intimate an understanding of the film industry as I do, my son wanted to see results immediately. But of course these things don’t produce themselves. Apparently explaining how to import images, edit them and string them into a video file is not super interesting. But YouTube videos about the solar system apparently are. Thanks be to the Gods for two monitors.

Post Production Boredom

All in all, it was a great way to spend the morning. The only bad thing about having this much fun, is finding ways to raise the bar. I know that in two days when he’s home again, I’m going to have my work cut out for me!

Later, I caught my son getting a head start on the sequel and trying to take over the whole production with his own camera and all. To be continued…