Claymation comes to
middle school
By DANA
DUGAN
Express Staff Writer
Remember
when Mr. Bill and Gumby suddenly made their ways onto our television
screens in hilarious claymation shorts? Well, the Wood River Middle School’s
creativity class, taught by Marie Barton, has picked up on the slightly
subversive and silly technique.
Kaitlin
Gasenica, front, Sofia Blunt and Devyn Parnes pose with some
claymation figures in front of the Spiral Studio’s promotional Snail. Express
photo by Dana DuGan
All fall,
Barton and her fellow teacher, Steve Poklemba, worked with 40 students in
the seventh and eighth grades from the GATE program. Their work resulted
in seven claymation shorts that were shown at a red carpet opening night
invitation only gala. The Claymation Festival was held at the Middle
School last Friday. The awards from the gala will be announced at the
school’s Talent Show in March.
To begin,
each group was separated into two factions, a production team and a
promotion team, with a floater who worked both sides of the fence. The
production team, advised on technical matters by Poklemba, turned in
storyboards to be approved prior to beginning the painstaking shooting
process. Using a freeze frame procedure, the movements are shot in small
incremental sections and then seamlessly edited on iMovie software.
Characters
with such names as Long Legs Magee, Mr. Poo, Feegrish, Mildue the Monkey
and Kwack were made in clay and used in each the shorts. Each one lasts
between one to seven minutes.
Though time
consuming, the process worked because the more the students learned about
the process, from pre-production to post production, the more they wanted
to accomplish, Barton said.
"It’s
education the way it should be. They are making a product," Poklemba
said. "It’s some thing, not just a grade, or a paper."
His
students concur. "I like the crafty part, more work on some thing,
not so much sitting," said seventh grader Devyn Parnes, of the Spiral
Studio, who made a short entitled "Romantic Slime."
Classmate,
Sofia Blunt, of the Gears Studio who made "Joe," agreed.
"The final product is some thing you’ve accomplished."
The
students had so much to do to be ready for The Claymation Festival that
they came in on weekends and often stayed at school late into the
evenings. The promotion team was responsible for the many large scale
statues that decorated the main lobby and hallway of the middle school.
Decorated chairs, which hung from the walls, encouraged people to attend
the opening night. Posters and heads, in the style of each short, were
hung on the walls as well. Three dimensional invitations were created for
parents, as well as corresponding toys, which were raffled off at the
festival.
Even the
titles of the shorts were hashed over and had to pass muster with the
teachers. The title had to be abstract, said Poklemba. They couldn’t
reveal what the short was about but "kept you guessing."
"Tortoise and the Hair," and "Romantic Slime" are two
examples.
"You
trust the kids and they’ll do good work," Poklemba said.