Hernando de Soto

Oliver Rock
American Studies
November 5, 2007
Stop Frame Reflection Essay

I made my stop frame animation about Hernando de Soto, it tells about his life, his journeys to find new lands, and explorations of the world.

The part of the project I thought was most fun was watching the all the little pictures we had taken. It was satisfying to watch as all those little pictures turn into a stop frame movie. I also liked watching the special effects happen. For example the water, which was made out of plastic wrap, looked really good when we moved it around. We could also make a splash with the water. The clay was also fun because in one of our scenes we had our characters digging for gold in the ground, which was made out of clay. Although, we did use Lego’s for our main material.

I thought that the most difficult part of the project was starting on the first scene. The first few scenes were difficult because it was hard to gage how many pictures to take because we hadn’t ever done this before. After we’d done a few scenes it got easier though. Bringing the materials was hard because I didn’t really know how many Lego’s to bring. Although when we had them at school, it was easy to make do with what we had. The audio in the stop frame was hard. You would have to try to get all the words out in time without skipping any words or not pronouncing something right.

The most important thing I learned when doing this project was to do a fair amount of work. If Riley or me didn’t work on something we were supposed to, it just set both of us back. I think that we both did a good job on working together. I learned that putting in hard work is better than just messing around. We both had to be focused when working on the project. Also learning how use The Gimp like on our map. I learned how to make an iMovie movie, and then upload it on to YouTube.

I thought that it was really satisfying to go onto YouTube and watch the movie. I’m glad we did the stop frames and I think it was a good experience to have. Taking all those pictures was definitely worth the final outcome.