My Birthday

On November 11, 2007 four friends and I went to a sonics game. The four people were Will, Riley, Sam, and Ben. We picked up Ben from a soccer game. After we picked him up we headed to Seattle for the game. We ate a Dick's and then went to the Kea Areana. We were early so we went to sit by the court before the game started. After we took our seats the game started after we took our seats and the Pistons, the visiting team got off to a 15-2 run. The Sonics lost in the end after coming back to tie the game. When we got home a 11:00 at night we started playing my PS2. We were up to 6:30 in the morning when the power finally went out. Once every one had left I slept for almost the rest of the day.

My Old Memory

My whole life I have had a short memory of going to a mariners baseball game inside the kingdom. All that I can remember is hiding in my dad's lap because because I was afraid of getting hit with a foul ball. When the mariners would hit a homerun there would be fireworks set off inside. Even though no pictures were taken I can remember the brightmess and the color of the fireworks just like I was there today. I can't remember anything else except for a few seconds when I was walking up the ramp to our seats. My parents can't believe I can remember back that far but i can see the fireworks going off after the many homeruns hit that night twelve years ago when I was three years old.

The Journey of Hernando Cortes Claymation

In the first quarter of eighth grade my American Studies class did a partner project on an American explorer. The project was a claymation that would eventually be placed on YouTube. My partner, Austin Baker, and I chose Hernando Cortes. The project was my favorite one I have ever done not only because of the claymation, but also because of the different stages of the project. Overall the stop frame animation project on Hernando Cortes was very fun, challenging, and I learned a lot from it.

There were numerous things that were fun, exciting and enjoyable. The best, for me, was seeing the final project finally get finished and placed on YouTube. I enjoyed seeing all of my hours of work come together. Seeing all of the scenes, narration, dialog and sound effects combined was exhilarating. Showing people in and out of school and seeing their reaction was very exciting. It has been great to be able to show anyone who has the internet my claymation. Overall the claymation was a very fun project and it was very hard to pick a favorite part because the whole thing was awesome.

The most difficult part of the claymation project on Hernando Cortes was the filming of each frame. It was very hard to keep the camera in the same place, while, at the same time, move each person just a little bit before each new photo. Claymations are very difficult because you must do each scene in one time session. Otherwise the camera will move and it is be hard to remember where each person was the day before. Since each picture was only 0:00:05 seconds long, to make the final movie look smooth each photo must be almost identical. This part of the claymation was more challenging than hard. Even though it was challenging, I think the final project turned out great.

Of the many things that I learned doing the claymation on Hernando Cortes, the most important was learning about the explorer. It was very interesting to find out facts about Hernando Cortes. Over the many stages of the project I learned at least one new thing each time. I learned the most during the first stage of the project. While doing the outline, Austin and I had to find out many topics and five points about each one. While reading internet sites and looking through books, I found out almost all there is to know about the explorer Hernando Cortes. There were many other important things I learned as well like how to use iMovie and other computer software and how to make a claymation. This was a great project and I learned a lot of important things from it.

Over all, when I look back on the whole project, I learned so much and had a lot of fun doing it. All of the parts of the project, from the outline to uploading the final claymation on to YouTube, were very enjoyable and made me work very hard. The claymation was the favorite project I have ever done because I learned lots of new things and I got to do things that I had never done before. There were difficult parts and easy parts. The difficult things were really more challenging than hard which always kept me busy. This was a great and educational project that was very enjoyable. I love being able to watch my movie on YouTube and to show it to anyone, anytime, and
almost anywhere.