Thinking Outside the Box Final Animation!

The animation is completed!
At a school with no computer lab we did something pretty fun and innovative on super low budget. We created this stop motion animation using a borrowed laptop, a $15 dollar mike, two still digital cameras, clay, two small stages and an assortment of freeware and donated software.

I just ran the voice files through another filter in my audio editing software (freeware called Audacity) to completely eliminate the humming. It turned out that I had the "gain" volume up all the way on my digital microphone when I recorded. I now know better. I thought this would make the volume of the speaker louder. Turning the gain up all the way actually makes the microphone pick up all the ambient noise around...fridge, air conditioner, rustling paper, etc. It takes a bit of digital acrobatics to eliminate the ambient noise and get the voices clear.

The children had gotten a taste of using the freeware Audacity in class when I recorded them and they tried some filters on their files to clean them up or make their recorded voices louder.

The children did a great job with this very involved animation project. I was very impressed that they challenged themselves to create two transformations for their cubes rather than the one transformation I had suggested. I hadn't planned on that and was happily surprised to see how well the two transformations worked out.



On Tuesday (if my family doesn't get hit by the flu I had last week) I will be going into Horace Cureton to give each child his/her DVD of the animation and to give them a hands on demo of the software I used. I will have a few students try out editing some of their clay images in Photoshop and a few will import into Premiere Elements. It would be great for them to have a taste of the software used. This workshop series was composed of 8 one and a half hour sessions in the classroom, plus the additional editing time in my studio. I can't believe it is done!