Monday, June 26, 2017

Stop Motion

We started week #2 of Art Camp this morning, meeting together at the Quinlan again.  She had a really fun time, working with mixed media and fabrics this morning, and of course doing the games she loves - something to do with werewolves and villagers?  Anyway, she really has a great time there at the Quinlan Arts Center.

Afterwards, we did a bit of grocery shopping, and then a bit of stop-motion movie making.  Madison used an app and a little kit she got for Christmas to make small bits of animation using her iPad mini. We have a mini-green screen, and she was able to create the scene of a beach in the background, and then had characters from the movie "Cars 2" racing by on it.  In last place, just after the four cars characters that raced across, there was a sea turtle crawling by.  The kit had a few characters that you could pose, so she had fun making them dance and so forth, but the feeling is that she's just getting started with this.


"Back in the day," Daddy did a bit of stop-motion work with clay.  We had colorful little clay monsters line dancing, moving across kitchen tables and so forth.  At one point, someone thought it would be a brilliant idea to have one crawl into a microwave and explode.  The thinking was that if we put a bunch of popcorn kernels into the clay monster's head, they'd pop, and there'd be a great explosion with clay everywhere and stuff.  Keep in mind we were kids, and not that all that experienced with clay, microwaves, or intelligence.  Anyway, we put it in there, and even recorded a voice for the clay character that was fretting with worry for... two minutes, maybe?  That's about how long it took for nothing terribly visible to happen.  We thought it would melt and pop and be all weird.  But it sort of just sagged... and started smoking.  Yes, there was a lot of smoke coming out of the microwave.  And that's when we started to panic a little, quickly stopping it all before the smoke alarms went off!  Anyway, the monster survived the microwave, and if life were a movie, he'd be given special microwave powers and would come after each of us many years later, this large claymation monster lurking in the woods.

Tonight, we continued the Marvel marathon once more with a visit to the "Age of Ultron."  It's been said a few times before, but the "Age" of Ultron only lasts a few hours.  So, maybe "Short Span of Ultron" might be more appropriate, unless there's something we don't know that happens afterwards.  Either way, the movie gets more enjoyable with each viewing, as there are things you catch that maybe you didn't before.  We had our popcorn, and Madison had a few new things as well:

1.  Pita chips.  Madison reluctantly tried pita chips, and realized that she in fact really liked these pita chips.  Now Daddy has to keep an eye on his pita chips.  Because Daddy really likes pita chips!

2.  An ice cream float with orange soda.  Oh, and this was delicious.  Mommy made these for everyone, and we all sat at the table to enjoy a tasty treat tonight.

We celebrated our victory in the Battle of Trenton, and then it was time head upstairs for the next few chapters of our Squirrel Girl book.  We're still going on this devotional too, by the way.  It's got fifty-six or seven entries, each dedicated to a different superhero.  So yeah, this one is taking a while to get through.  But it's loads of fun.  Tonight was the Punisher.  I don't think he'll show up with Squirrel Girl, although she has made reference to Daredevil, and had text conversations with Rocket Raccoon, Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, and Bucky Barnes.  It's been a fun book - she loves it, but we do too. We sort of look forward to reading before bedtime!

Speaking of superheroes, here's the screen graphic for that upcoming new series in July.  This one will be all about superhero movies, a series where we show clips from different movies and talk about Biblical concepts along the way.  It's going to be a nice series!


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