The Science Class SMU Project

In my final piece I worked with Ceri. From the beginning I was unsure as to whether I should do a flip book, or a clay animation. Having looked on the web and on YouTube for some inspiration, I discovered that we could make a clay animation of a scenario in a science class where there is a teacher giving a Science lesson to two pupils. This would be both interesting and informative. Once we had settled on this idea, we both arranged to meet up to discuss exactly how we were going to make our animation. First of all we needed a classroom setting, some options here could have been to use Green Screening, but we decided to use an actual set instead as I felt it would add to the realism and feel of the piece. I wanted it to feel like a low-budget inidendent movie. Once we had made the set, we then made the plasticine figures which would become our main characters. Now that we had our set and 'actors' we needed a script and a basic storyline. Obvisously there was a 2 minute cap on what we could present, so we needed to find a way to create a classroom scene that presented facts, and close the 'story'. I felt that 2 minutes was not enough. Ceri and I both wrote the script together, making sure we presented enough factual information to go with the animation. We also decided to include the teacher and the children doing some experients in the 'classroom' as this would both look visually appealing, and also be informative for the KS1 target audience we were aiming for. Once we had roughly two minutes, we started to play with our figures and see if the script we had written was attainable within the setting we had created. Before begining filming, we decided to make intro credits at the beginning of the piece. At first we decided to write the words out on the white board that had been placen in the front of our fictional classroom, but the thought of actually capturing the words being written on the board came to me, and we decided to attempt to film it. Despite it being a long, labouring process, I think it worked out really well, and very much inspired by the 'lo-fi' credits in the film Juno, I decided to include the very same song as they use in the movie. As for the filming of the piece, the only challenges being presented were adapting each scene to fit in with the exact amound of speech that we had in the script. Also getting our little charachters to stand up and not fall down constantly was frustrating. We filmed the visual side of the project in one very long day and were very pleased with how it turned out. Next we spent all day recording the audio in Audacity andimporting every bit of speech into Zu3D. This took longer than anticipated, and it possibly would have been easier had we done it all in one go, however there was too much margin for error by doing it this way, and so we decided to do it little by little. After the speech we needed to have a few sound effects such as the door closing and a "crash" sound when one of the boys falls over after the tug of war. We recorded them using Audacity once again and added them to the piece. All that was left was to add the end credits, which we did in the same style as we had done with the intro. I am very pleased with how it turned out, it surpassed my initial expectations. I also very much enjoyed working in a group with Ceri.