REDMOND – At John Tuck Elementary School, small groups of children between second and fifth grade are learning the art of clay animation – or claymation.

Second-graders and best friends Gracie Harnden and Rachael Harrang collaborated recently to make everything from garden hats to tie-dyed pants.

”We don’t know the story yet, but this is our favorite thing in school,” said Gracie.

Similar to the productions of Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, Calif., the students are creating their own colorful backdrops, their own quirky clay figurines, their own storyline, and then, ultimately, their own animated movie.

Director and second-grade teacher Carrie Caramella, who was personally invited to Pixar Studios to watch a production after she wrote to Pixar about her classes’ work, is a passionate lover of art and self-proclaimed ”animation nut.”

”This is just something I love to do,” she said, ”so I want to share it with the kids and the teachers. But if you want to try it, you need to be into it because it’s a lot of work.”

Getting started

A teacher for 16 years, Caramella knew next to nothing five years ago about producing an animated film. She decided in 2001 to attend an art institute for teachers at Western Oregon University in Monmouth.

At the workshop, she partnered with other teachers on story ideas, experimenting with technological equipment and even taking advice from Jim Blashfield, one of Michael Jackson’s animation producers enlisted for various music videos.

In 2002, Caramella returned, along with 14 other second-year teachers, to hone the newborn skills she had learned the year before.

”It was then that I really started to get into it,” Caramella explained. ”Jim taught us that we can’t overdo animation – there would just be too much going on. When we’d show our film, and they’d tell us to do it over, we couldn’t believe it wasn’t perfect the first time. But we’d be even more proud of it after it was redone.”

Technical tricks

Have you ever tried to fathom how long it would take to make a single 11-minute animated film? Well, imagine this: Just one second of film requires 24 to 32 frames of still shooting, equating to 1,440 frames per minute.

All told, that’s 15,840 frames for an 11-minute movie – and Caramella’s classes have done several of them. Including short videos – some as short as 40 seconds. John Tuck students have completed 13 claymation movies.

”It’s very tedious,” said Caramella, ”but it’s a group effort. The students make all the stuff. It’s important to me that the videos are a reflection of the kids expressing themselves. I don’t want (the movies) to be me.”

Churning out a claymation film used to be much slower for the students than it is today. Originally, Caramella recorded the frames onto a video camera first, then loaded them onto the computer, a process that required extensive editing. Now she owns an advanced type of computer called a lunchbox, which allows her to hook the camera up to the computer as well as a television monitor and see the frame being shot on the television screen as it is happening.

”By using the lunchbox, we receive instant feedback because the camera acts as an eye,” explained Caramella. ”It is also child-friendly, and you can manipulate the film a lot more with a lunchbox.”

The final product

For both Caramella and Tuck students, the labor involved in animation has paid off. They completed their first award-winning show by the end of the 2003 school year, which was a combination clay and colored drawing piece. Out of 175 entries, it was one of 25 chosen to be shown at the Portland Museum of Art during the Northwest Film Center’s Young Peoples Film and Video Festival.

”The Polka Dot Day,” created by a team of 32 students during Caramella’s summer animation club, was also selected for the same festival in July of this year.

Soon after, Caramella wrote an ”animation connection” grant proposal to the ING Unsung Heroes Awards Program based in Virginia, winning $2,000 for John Tuck.

”Who knows what (the students’) potential is?” she mused. ”Who knows how far they will go with claymation?”