In the latest in a series of student-led projects in Hudson, New York, fourth- and fifth-graders worked together to create a series of animated shorts. WAMC’s Southern Adirondack Bureau Chief Lucas Willard reports on an evening of slimes, magical portals, and unlucky Graham crackers.
“Sit back, relax and enjoy the show.”
Inside Hudson Hall Opera House, parents and community members gathered to watch stop-motion shorts created by students at Montgomery C. Smith Elementary School.
The students, part of the school’s Extended Learning Time Program, spent the last several months studying animation and creating stories, characters, sets, and miniature models for their first dives into stop-motion.
Students greeted guests and showed off their creations before their shorts played on the big screen. In “Magical Mansion,” created by Jaylee Mignott and Bella Moran, a girl steps into a magical portal, as Mignott explains…
“We have our character named Caprice’s home, and this is the other setting which is the magical spot where she ends up…” said Mignott.
The shorts demanded a lot of work from the students, but Moran says she enjoyed the process. “I liked creating all the props and it was really fun collaging to make them,” said Moran.
In “Slime Trouble,” created by Michael Weaver and Kamran Miah, two friends in a car are…well, it’s better to let them explain it. Weaver goes first.
“Lonely Lard and Jeffrey the Snake are going to a dinner party with their family and they’re bringing cake but there’s these slimes who want to eat the cake,” said Weaver.
“…Because they’re hungry…” said Miah.
“…Yup. And then they have, like, a little show off in the middle of the street,” said Weaver.
“I just loved working with one of my best friends and thinking, like, what are we gonna do that we would like and everyone else in the crowd would like?” said Weaver.
“I also like how we made, like, the characters and also how we had multiple ideas that we did all work in, they all went into this,” said Miah.
The third short of the night was “Abraham the Graham,” created by Mack Depace, Joseph Weiss, and Kouchik Miah. DePace explains what happens to their titular character…
“It’s about a Graham cracker that’s personified and comes to life, and they crash their car and they break their leg, and things get wacky and go sideways,” said Depace. “We actually didn’t know if we wanted to add sounds because we didn’t have a lot of time left, but we thought it would be cool. So we added a few sounds. And some other tough things, it was hard to make it sure there was enough time for people to read the speech bubbles, too.”
The ELT group in 2023 spent their year creating short films, a change from previous groups that worked on murals in 2021 and 2022. ELT co-instructor and visual artist Louse Smith said this year’s stop-motion project presented challenges. The medium takes a lot of time and a lot of teamwork.
“We didn’t really know where this was headed in the end, and we kind of needed to just sort of be able to work with each other and feel out exactly the different paces that we all work in,” said Smith.
This year, photographer Brian Zimmerman leant his expertise to the ELT class.
“We had to go through the math, you know, like, ‘Ten frames per second. Sixty seconds per minute.’ Like, what is that? It was even a math thing,” said Zimmerman. “Of course, we live in an image culture and now it’s like, I think of it as, like, you have to teach young people how to use images effectively. And I feel like they really tackled this challenge of using a single image in sequence and thinking about frame rate…”
Invited by personal letter from a student, Hudson Mayor Kamal Johnson arrived at the opera house to watch the films.
“I’m really glad I came because it’s a lot of cool stuff that’s happening. I’m excited,” said Johnson.
Johnson says the public-facing projects from the ELT group have had an impact on the small city. The mayor was interviewed for last year’s sound-poem and accompanying mural, painted at the Bliss Towers housing development.
“We gotten a ton of feedback, positive feedback about it. It’s just very good lucking for Hudson, and as far as, like, beautification efforts. But also, I live here, so, you know, I drive by them all the time and I just love to see it and I love that those kids that were involved are part of history that they can see every day in their community. It’s awesome,” said Johnson.
