Digital Video

While I haven't had a great deal of experience with digital videoing or editing, I did have the opportunity to take a class in animation in college. We learned several types ways to create animation with a camera. One of my favorite was clay animation. We created clay creatures with modeling clay. We would position them a shoot for three second intervals with the cameras; gradually moving the figures in between each shoot. When the shooting was finished we added the sound to the animation. The whole process was very time-consuming but also very fun. I had the chance to use this technique when student teaching in a middle school. The art teacher had an after-school program in which students created a short 15-30 second clay animation.
After clay animation we went onto to using collage for our next animation. We cut things from magazines or newspapers. In order to make people look like they were moving we had to cut the arms and legs into sections so that they could be moved in to different positions. We used the same camera set-up and shooting techniques as with the clay animation.
Finally, we learned how to make our drawings come alive through animation. We learned different techniques like drawing one letter to a word and shooting the letter, then draw the next letter and shoot for 3 seconds and so on. This technique could also be used to drawing a figure...draw a portion of the figure and shoot it with the camera, then draw another portion and shoot it, ect. You could cut out letters of characters and move them gradually across the background while shooting each position. I could see this technique being the easiest to teach to elementary students. The best reward is seeing the finished product!