| Step 1 |
First we chose an endangered or threatened animal to research. Most of us paired up for this. |
| Step
2 |
Next we gathered our information about the animals. We went to the Internet and we also went to the
library searching through books and magazines. We decided that the main topics for each animal would be:
description, status, habitat, food, danger to it, programs to help, and any interesting
facts. This took some time! |
| Step
3 |
We then were to write up the reports, typing them on word or works to be copied and pasted into webpages later. |
| Step
4 |
We made habitat backgrounds for our animals...these would be used for the claymation movies of our animals. |
| Step
5 |
Next we created our clay animals. This was fun! |
| Step
6 |
Well, this was the hardest but it was also lots of fun! We had to take several still photos of our animals in their habitats doing something that is normal to them. We all decided that our animals should be finding food. We had to do one at a time each day we met because we had only one camera to use. So, we helped each other with the scenes, taking turns taking the photos or just helping if we could. One thing we learned, the more photos you take, the better the movies will be. |
| Step
7 |
Clean up the photos using a photo editor. We used MGI Photo Suite's cloning tool to get rid of things like the wire if we had a flying animal or our hands or fingers or if we accidentally got something else in the pictures that did not belong. That was also fun to do but it took a long time. |
| Step
8 |
Put all of our photos that we decided to use into Picture Works SpinPhoto Object (this was what we used because it came with the Clay Animation kit we were using). We then made the AVI movie files for each animal. |
| Step
9 |
We decided to put short narrations with each movie. We timed our movies so we would know how long we had for the sound. |
| Step
10 |
We recorded the short narrations to be added to the
AVI file. We used our sound recorder on our computer to do this. |
| Step
11 |
We used Pinnacle software to add the sound to our AVI movie and converted the movie to RealPlayer's streaming movie. Our coach helped us with that. |
| Step
12 |
We then built the report webpages and placed the clay animation files on each report page. |
