In 1999, when I was eight years old, I saved my allowance to purchase my very own VHS tape. After weeks of chores, I finally accumulated ten dollars, a veritable fortune to an eight-year-old in the nineties. My excitement could not be contained as my mother drove the family to Blockbuster. When we entered the store, she walked me over to the kids’ movies. “you can pick anything from this section as long as it’s less than the money you have saved,” she said as she unleashed me on the perspective titles. After what felt like an hour of searching, I saw Tim Burton’s A Nightmare Before Christmas. The cover was enticing, and the art and character design were attractive. It was also sitting in a bargain bin for $2.99; I had to have it. After the purchase (and spending $7.01 on candy) we went home and watched the film. The movie was incredible; it was a Disney film created entirely with stop motion, the sets were mesmerizing, and the characters moved so fluidly. Afterward, my mother explained that this film was produced by taking thousands of photos and moving the characters by hand, one frame at a time. The process sounded painstakingly slow, but the finished product was something to behold. I remember thinking I would love to create my stop-motion animation someday.
Fast-forward to last week in my technology class. As we approach Halloween, The Nightmare Before Christmas is still on my mind. However, we have a project coming up. The class is to create its own stop-motion animation and then teach those skills to a class so they can direct and produce their own short film! Incredible. My partner and I chose leggo action figures to use as our cast and decided on a simple plot where a truck gets stuck on a small ferry made out of leggos, and a Lego character dressed in a pea costume flies in to save the day. After 5 minutes of storyboarding and 20 minutes of taking careful photos, we played the video… it was 4 seconds long.
Is this movie close to the seven-time award-winning masterpiece Tim Burton created with Nightmare Before Christmas? No. Did it bring me joy to create? Yes. Creating this short film was engaging, a great experience, and a valuable tool to learn to use for myself and my teaching career.
Stop-motion allows the creation of a story and can be a fantastic tool to teach students elements of plot, conflict, and resolution. The medium has excellent curricular connections to language arts, science, and technology, but most of all, it’s fun! In our simple story, my partner and I laughed a lot as we moved the figures around, trying to keep our hands out of the frame. We collaborated and shared ideas about how to get specific photos, and although the process took some time, it was highly accessible and easy to use. In my classroom, I would love to use stop motion to aid in teaching about stories and let students experience the magic of film by becoming their own producers, directors and editors.