Claymation essay

Ellie and I were partners on our claymation project on Francisco Coronado. This explorer was an interesting person. It seemed odd to think that an explorer in history risked his life and the lives of others to search for seven cities of gold. That sounds more like a character in a fable, not history.
The most enjoyable part of the project was being partners with Ellie. Every day we worked was fun and enjoyable. The partnership worked well for both of us because we planned ahead and completed our work before it was due. Ellie and I got together a couple of times each week to make clay figures and scenes and to take pictures. If my partner’s mom or schedule wouldn’t let them do that, we would never have gotten the project done because it was very time consuming and there was no way to complete this project only during class. Recording the audio was probably the most fun. We had so many re-dos in audio. Ellie was the narrator and I took care of the technical work and dialogue. At the end of a couple of scenes we could be heard laughing or making fun of each other on the audio, but we deleted those recordings. Overall, having Ellie as my partner was very beneficial because we learned to work together and we received a good grade too.
The technical parts were difficult because other people (besides Ellie and me) had access to our work and could tamper with it. We had photos deleted from our videos, audio removed and whole videos deleted. Ellie and I spent way too many class periods re-doing work or looking for our photos or videos on the computer. Even though we were ahead of schedule for taking photos for our scenes, the technical challenges made us get behind schedule. It was challenging enough to complete the project and upload the photos, make a video, get the audio to match the video and do it seven times, but to keep losing it was absolutely frustrating. It was especially difficult to get the audio to match the speed of the photos and flow with the rest of the video. At the end of the project, we added all the single videos to one single big video. We need to make all the videos Quick Time files and then save the videos to the desktop. Four of our videos were missing, deleted, gone. We couldn’t find them on the hard drive for two days. By far, the technology of this project was our biggest challenge.
The most important lesson I learned in this project was to make a separate backup on a zip drive or some other media so our work could be restored without having to start over. It was very challenging to have to re-do photos and audio. I found it a huge waste of time to constantly re-do parts of the project because they were missing on the hard drive. When a part of our project was deleted or moved, and we could not do anything about it, our scene was late and our grade was lower than we wanted. In the future, I would like more control in keeping our project safe by saving it to our own backup. It’s very frustrating to have no control over what happens to our project when it is saved on the school’s computer and we have deadlines to meet. Also, in the future, I would like access to the computer program at home so we can work on this at home. Then if we had extra photos to add to our scene, we could add another clay character and take extra photos and go directly to the program and add them without having to be at school. It would have been good to have the audio at home too so we could make those changes because it was often hard to get the project done on time. Finally, we found it was very important to PLAN AHEAD for anything we did have control over.
In conclusion, I had fun on this project even though it was extremely long. I enjoyed learning a new technology and hope to enjoy the final video if it ever gets finished once we find our missing parts. I also learned a painful lesson to rely on yourself and your own backup and not to trust the school’s computers as the only place to save my work.