With the close of yet another nine weeks of the school year, many emotions have ignited in students. The weight of grades may burden some students while other shine as brightly as their hard-earned grades they have achieved. For Mr. Paul Volk’s, Art, Advanced 3D Art students, they are feeling the pressure of crunch time.

The art students’ creativity levels have been put to the test through their assignment to create a one to one-and-a-half-minute stop-motion animated film.

“[Our project is] a claymation of the representation of the Black Plague. We’re doing it based off of ‘Ring Around the Rosy’ and the true meaning behind it,” Brianna Dougherty (11) said.

Dougherty and her fellow group members Ryan Bertossi (11), Haley Schuberth (11), Gina Gutierrez (11) and Samantha Lea (12) have collaborated to produce their project. Mr. Volk gave his students few boundaries when it came to creativity.

“We wanted to do something different, so we decided to do a dark twist on a nursery rhyme,” Bertossi said.

The group’s shared values of detail and precision could be found in their handmade set and characters.

“We were going to put actual clothes on [the characters], but that would be too time-consuming, so we painted them. But then something happened with the paint, and whenever you would paint them, they would turn out oily, so then we had to paint over them with glue,” Bertossi said.

To film the project, the group needed to take 24 pictures to create just one second.

“We’re not even done, but we have 600 [pictures], and that’s without the credits,” Bertossi said, “Ours is the best in the class.”

Gallery • 3 Photos

Ryan Bertossi (11) precisely adjusts one of the three claymation characters being used for his group’s stop-motion animation project for Advanced Three Dimensional Art. Their project had to be one to one and a half minutes long.