Stop Motion Project Reflection

For our stop motion project, I worked with Melike Akay, Betül Akbaş and Özge Rüveyda

Yıldırım. We think that the video will help our students to learn the topic easier since it provides

the target vocabulary with pictures and audio, in a meaningful context/story we created. Our first

idea was to focus on countries and nationalities only, that’s why we had more countries in mind.

But then we realized we had not much to talk about these countries and we were repeating the

same things unless we add different vocabulary and concepts into the video. Hence weather

conditions and cultural information came into the picture. This can be an example to flexibility

and elaboration because we tried to look from different angles and made changes to solve the

problem at hand. As for the character, we first considered a bard to be travelling around the

world. He was going to compose and play his songs in each country, but then we decided that we

could find a more suitable character for younger audience. We got inspired by Melike’s

keyholder, Halı, we decided to make it our protagonist. The name Pertev stuck from one of the

previous ideas, which is the robot from an old Turkish TV show. Last step was to come up with a

story to give this project a context and a purpose and we suddenly imagined him as alienated

from other bears because of his color. I believe it’s really good and significant since it inherently

represents a real-world problem too. Still, we created a unique context and this represents the

originality of our production.

When we first started on the project, we were pretty much lost. We didn’t make good

planning, we lacked the necessary materials and the knowledge. Not just the technical

knowledge, but the elements that make stop motion special as well. When I think about other

productions in our class, I think we had the most creative motions in our animation such as the

papers crinkling and opening, letters sliding, plane scene and so on. When you don’t add these
type of transitions, it looks like an ordinary animation and not more in my opinion. Thus, I made

my friends watch some of my favourite stop motions from the Vine App era and it truly helped

us. In terms of technicality, yes it’s a real torture. Our muscles were aching, sometimes we had to

shoot from the scratch and even so, there are lots of lighting and frame mistakes in the final

production. Some groups were far better than us in that sense. Still, when we got the gist of it, it

got easier and easier. We made our plans, we knew how to use the room, the materials and we

were coming up with new ideas all the time. It was a true example of creativity and problem

solving I think. Whenever we had a problem with the materials, scenes or camera, we solved it

immediately and created new possibilities because we knew that we had limited time, we were a

group and it wouldn’t be possible to find another suitable time for all 4 of us.

Other important skills that we’ve gained as a group are time management and

collaboration. We worked together in harmony, and divided the labor successfully when it’s

necessary. We finished everything on time thanks to our problem solving and decision making

skills, and we managed to participate and take responsibility equally. These are important

achievements especially for teacher candidates because education sometimes is a teamwork,

involving students, parents other teachers and school principle as well. We’ll also be guiding our

own students in their group works encourage collaboration too.

Overall I enjoyed this experience, but I still don’t see myself reaching out to this for a

possible project for my future students. I don’t think it is innovative at all, it is more on the

“obsolete” side even. It is too demanding and takes a lot of time to master, and really not the best

technique for instructional purposes. Creators obviously gain lots of skills, whereas the outcome

product is going to waste. It doesn’t make much of a difference, as I said, when a video lacks the

necessary transitions for a stop motion and at that point, a normal animation would suffice for the
learner as well. I actually met stop motion on Vine, and they looked much more fun and

appealing as 7-second videos. So, if I ever need to assign students with this technique, I would

make them do it as much smaller projects just to have creative scenes for artistic purposes rather

than instructional ones.