REEDSVILLE - The word claymation usually conjures up images of a wobbly green man and his orange horse or corny Christmas musicals from decades gone by.
The form of stop motion animation, which was experimented with as early as the turn of the 20th century, is not as popular a medium as it was in the 1960s, but the fifth graders at Brown Elementary School pupils are staging a comeback.
When art teacher Joyce Picketts asked her students for ideas for an end of the year project, fifth grader Carson King proposed making clay animation videos. He said he likes to watch the British "Wallace and Gromit" movies and other claymation videos on YouTube.
Picketts said the art form was foreign to her, but she did not say no. Instead she researched the method and recruited local IT specialists to help the pupils produce their films.
Over the past couple weeks, teams of three pupils drew storyboards, modeled clay and designed sets for their videos. With
cameras on short tripods, the pupils snapped pictures in between slight movements of their characters. They entered their photo frames onto a computer program that flashes them in rapid succession, creating the sense of movement. This week, the fifth graders are editing their videos and adding music.
"It's interesting that it takes thousands of shots to make a movie," King said, adding that professional films average 16 frames per second.
His team put together a short claymation sketch using fruit and gecko characters from TV commercials. Their video is shorter than some of the other teams', with only 52 frames, King said.
The biggest challenge was keeping the scene consistent by not bumping the table or the props, King said.
Across the room, three girls worked on their sketch, "The Lazy Cats." In their 130-frame film, Ella Grove, Angela Lester and Arcelia Ibarra created three cats laying on a bed that wake up, jump off the bed and take a walk around the room before falling back to sleep.
Emma Daubert, Mattie Kenepp and Hannah Sutton's film shows a banana unpeel and get eaten.
"Ours is 123 frames, and it turned out to be 33 seconds," Kenepp said, explaining how much time it took to develop the video.
Flashing across other computer screens were a melting ice cream cone, a cowboy unhitching a horse and wagon, and a caveman sleeping in bed with a dinosaur peeking through his window.
From its earliest forms, stop-motion animation traditionally has carried absurd or humorous themes.
The first film to use the technique is believed to be "The Humpty Dumpty Circus," an 1897 American animation where a toy circus comes to life, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. The film was developed by Albert E. Smith, who borrowed his daughter's toy circus and succeeded in animating the acrobats and animals by shooting them in barely changed positions one frame at a time.
For the Brown Elementary pupils, the tedious work of taking frames and moving objects ever so slightly drew no complaints, their teacher said. Claymation was an outlet for creativity as well as a learning experience about stop-motion animation, Picketts said.
"It's been a good taste of what goes into making claymation," she said.
