Mitosis Project: Claymation

  1. To start, you will need to choose a partner and pick two consecutive stages of mitosis to animate.
  2. Use your completed Handout as your reference. You may also look up images of the stages to further visualize them, but any images within your video must be original (meaning your team created them).
  3. Together, you will craft still shots of those stages of mitosis. Be sure to have a title shot of each stage you are animating. Try to make it engaging as well as informative.
  4. In stop-motion, the “frame rate” is an important consideration. The more frames you have per second, the smoother the animation is. A good refresh rate is 10 frames per second. So a one minute video would need 60 seconds X 10 frames=600 frames. You can add hand-drawn visuals to reduce the amount of individual frames needed to fully explain the stage, or you can have a slower frame rate of no lower than 5 frames per second.
  5. Material for sculpting: Play-Doh works, but needs to be stored in plastic baggies so it does not dry-out; modeling clay is better as it never dries out, but your hands get sticky, so you will need baby wipes. You will also need sculpting tools, like a popsicle stick, toothpick, pencil, etc. Plan for storage of your clay, with a note indicating where you stopped animating.

    Pink clay shark ready to eat clay fish
    https://pixabay.com/photo-1620463/
  6. Also needed, a recording device. If you are using a phone or iPad, you need to stabilize the device so it does not move between shots. If you are using a laptop, it is easier to stabilize. Whatever you use, keep track of the device positioning (including the tripod points, if you have one) with marks on the set (use tape or marker on the set base).
  7. Your set should be portable, for example a small box tilted on the side, or even just a piece of folded cardboard anchored with taped “struts” on each side. Label your set with your class period and each of your names.
  8. Programs for editing: once you shoot the pictures, you need to upload them into an editing program. Apple OS devices already have iMovie. Free apps to try are Stop Motion and Lego MovieMaker. You do not need to buy any software to complete this project–let your teacher know if you are having tech accessibility issues. Here are two quick explanatory videos here- http://www.makerspaceforeducation.com/stop-motion-animation.html
  9. Have fun and do not stress that your movie is not perfect—claymation takes a lot of patience in addition to creativity!

The rubric for the Mitosis Project Claymation is below (9 points maximum):

Pro:

  •  The claymation explains two consecutive stages of Mitosis clearly 3/3 points
  •  The claymation shows attention to detail 3/3 points
  •  The claymation is at least 1 minutes long 3/3 points

Apprentice:

  • The claymation explains two consecutive stages of Mitosis, but lacks full clarity on how they are different 2/3 points
  • The claymation shows some attention to detail 2/3 points
  • The claymation is at least 40 seconds long 2/3 points

Novice:

  • The claymation does not clearly explain the two consecutive stages of Mitosis and how they differ 1/3 points
  • The claymation lacks attention to detail 1/3 points
  • The claymation is less than 40 seconds long 1/3 points