Lesson Plan for Stop Motion Animation

I chose stop motion animation because it involves multiple skills to work in conjunction to create the final product. Stop motion animation is a combination of photography and videography. These mediums also require knowledge about color, composition, and lighting.
When making a lesson plan for stop motion animation, I thought that it would be best to consider how much students know about artistic processes and their cognitive abilities. Younger students will only be able to think concretely, while adolescents will be able to think more abstractly. To challenge their cognitive development and keep the lesson student-directed, I used the idea of transformative cycles to inspire the lesson.
For elementary aged students, I would ask students to consider the world around them and think of things in their lives that change from one thing to another, like in the popular game Pokemon where Pokemon evolve into stronger versions of themselves, or like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly. I would continue a dialogue with my students about other things in their lives that can change from one thing to another. Afterwards, I would let them play with different colored clay to see how they can transform it into different shapes and back again to it's original form. This way, they can discover artistic processes on their own. Once they have had time with the material, I would break them into teams and start having them come up with an idea related to the transformation of things in their world to create a visual representation of that. Students would be able to take this idea in a literal way or in a conceptual way.
For high school students, I would have students also consider the world around them, but in a more conceptual way. Students would think about how they evolve themselves, and how they change over time. They would be self-reflecting for the basis of their projects. Their projects could be themed biologically, mentally, emotionally, and maybe how the transformative cycles around them have changed them. As students consider this concept, they would be playing and breaking down the aspects of stop motion animation. Students will explore different ways of making a stop motion animation with different mediums and different ways of taking the photos for the video. They will also explore ways of how to edit the video pre or post production. They would choose which medium they want to work with based on how well they can demonstrate their concept with it.
Based on adolescent cognitive development of students at different ages and creating open-ended lessons, I thought that these lesson plans would be appropriate.