Amerigo Vespucci

Amerigo Vespucci

This quarter we made clay animations about famous European explorers. My partners Justina, Layla, and I made an animation on Amerigo Vespucci, an explorer from Spain who founded America. Amerigo is also where the name “America” came from. He was an astronomer that navigated some of Christopher Columbus’s voyages. We made our animation about Amerigo’s early life, family, education, and his first voyage. Making this animation was a lot of fun because we got to make our own clay people and our own adio.

The most fun part of this project was making the clay people. Some of our people are a little wack but I think they look really cool. Another extremely fun part of the project was one particular scene, the scene when he got sick. I think that was the most fun scene to take because he was puking a lot. So it was really fun to smooch a whole bunch of colors together to make a puke color. It was a creative scene too, because we made everyone faint and the lady started puking too because she got so grossed out. Doing the adio was also a lot of fun.

The most difficult part of the project was recording the scenes. It was also really frustrating because you had to try to keep the camera really still. Another difficult part of this project was moving the clay people. Every time you moved it, you had to move it a certain amount. It was also very hard trying to keep your hand out of the background! Especially when you are trying to hold up the background paper. Another very difficult part of this project was doing the research on Amerigo. Since Amerigo is not very famous there was not a lot of information about him. Also a lot of web sites had false information on them.

The most important thing that I learned by doing this project was probably that clay animations take a lot of patients! If you are a very impatient person, then you might not want to try making a clay animation! Another important thing I learned by doing this project is that Christopher Columbus was not the first person to find America, Amerigo was. Amerigo came to America 13 months before Christopher did. Although they did not know they went to the same place until later on. One last important thing that I learned by doing this project was how to work imovie on the computer and how to import pictures and adio. Now I actually know how to do most of that stuff which is good for later on in the school year if I ever need to use that program again.

All together this one a really fun and worthwhile project. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun at the same time! Which is something that school needs. I hope that our next project we do includes clay, or something fun that we get to build. But between the research for this project, the creations of our clay people, and filming each scene, this was an amazing project. With some ups and downs. For example... Having to retake a couple scenes because they were deleted off of our camera, or not knowing how to do something. But in the end, we made an outstanding animation.