Students brought their clay figures to life using their school laptop computers to create a clay animation video. The multimedia art class is new this year at Meridian Middle School.
Art teacher Alison Yeager, wanted to create an experience for students to incorporate their art creativity with technology to create a fun and visual final product.
Using Chromebooks and Google Slides, the goal was to create a one-minute stop motion video that tells a story with a clear beginning, middle and end.
For the lesson, students were broken into groups and had to sign up for jobs within their groups. The different jobs were storyboard creator, background/set designer, character designer, photographer and videographer.
“Even though they each had their individual jobs, they needed to work as a team to put it all together,” Yeager said.
Students used clay to design figures and paint and other materials to design set backgrounds. Once their figures and sets were complete, they used a camera to take many still images of the figurines, moving them slightly for each image.
Once students completed all of their images, they uploaded these to Google Slides to create the stop motion video. For this part of the lesson, Yeager invited Cynthia Richardson, instructional coach for technology integration, to explain the process.
“I have worked with Alison Yeager’s class on a few different media projects that tie in an art aspect,” Richardson said. “I think it’s cool that I get to join because it’s giving students a new way of thinking of what they have the power to do with their devices that they haven’t had before and it seems like the kids really enjoyed the project.”
Yeager said she hopes this project has helped students expand their thinking on what is possible when you incorporate technology into art.
“The overall takeaway is to give students the experience of how art and technology mesh as well as getting experience working collaboratively in art,” Yeager said. “Having technology in the classroom has opened a lot of doors for incorporating technology based art projects in the classroom and I am excited to see how the videos come together!”
View one of the stop motion clay animation videos created by students.