After my students created their monsters, they created sets to serve as a backdrop for our stop motion ovie. It's a creature feature, but rather than be bogged down with plot, we decided to just parade our little guys through various neighborhoods.
We used discarded shipboard and painted the stripes. Students then used paint pens to make store fronts, apartment buildings, and town houses. For my students who were totally blind, they glued doors, windows, stairs, bricks, stones, and siding from cut mat board. There was a lot of glue on a lot of fingers, but it was a great way to make a neighborhood that felt less flat.
One student who is especially interested in architecture did some research and created a street with the type of home you'd find in the French Quarter of New Orleans near a brownstone you'd find in New York City. We created trees and streetlights from coat pegs, and topiaries from wooden knobs in new boxes.
Of course we had to create white canes for our creatures to use on the sidewalk in front of a school for the Blind. Some of my students who have zero vision were able to help push the monsters across a set one tiny movement at a time, others could push the button to take a picture, and others could count to make sure we had enough pictures to complete a scene. We tried to give each scene about 10 seconds of air time, which at 12 frames per second, amounts to 120 pictures. If we went too fast or too slow, or if it just looked bad, we'd start over for that scene. The song for our monster movie was Low Rider by War, and we filled that whole funky soundtrack with about 2,300 frames. Filming only took a few days and we were all tickled with the results.
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