How lovely, that with everything going on, that some folks found the time to try their hand at archaeological stop motion! Let’s watch some films:

Buried Ship

Abby and Maggie Mullen write,

“We created this film because we like Vikings and we wanted to make something about the ocean. (Our team likes a lot of different archaeological sites, so we went through a lot of ideas before landing on this one!) We found that the two-minute limitation made it both easier and more challenging, because it’s difficult to communicate a complicated story in two minutes, with Legos, but that helped us narrow down our topic.

Our process started with research about different archaeological sites, and when we found two stories about different Viking ships found with GPR, we decided it could be fun to try to view the site from both above the ground and below it.

Our set designer painted our backdrops in watercolor and built the sets in Lego. We had to adjust the scale of our Lego models multiple times, which she built, to make our photography work. We weren’t 100% successful, but an 8yo’s attention span is limited and we can’t exactly run out to the store right now to get more supplies.

We used an iPhone to take the photographs. We set it up on a tripod with a remote shutter to make it easier to keep it mostly in the same place. We then transferred our photos to a MacBook Pro and put the photos into iMovie to create the stop-motion. Our “silent film” text slides were created in PowerPoint, and we used a song from the YouTube Studio free music collection for our soundtrack.”

Comments on Youtube include, “I really liked this! It was so interesting AND beautiful. Really well done. It made me want to learn more!” and “Great information! I did not know that Viking ships had been found so recently from so long ago. I greatly enjoyed the scene settings and photography. The accompanying music was excellent.”

The Venus of Willendorf: an archaeological yarn

Karen Miller writes,

“As a traditional women’s craft, crochet is an apt sculptural method to recreate an iconic archaeological artefact that evokes the beauty of the female body. I was excited to find the pattern at Lady Crafthole’s ‘Cabinet of Crochet Curiositie’s https://www.crochetcuriosities.com/. I filmed it on an ipad with the Stop Motion Studio app https://apps.apple.com/au/app/stop-motion-studio/id441651297 and added the title and credits in iMovie. ”

Archaeological Tea-construction

Beth Pruitt writes,

“This video is about methodological theory in archaeology, created for SAA’s Online Archaeology Week after the cancellation of the planned Austin Public Archaeology Day at the 2020 SAA Annual Meeting. Through observing the attributes of the rim sherd (its curvature, decoration, etc.), archaeologists can make inferences about the rest of the whole, even when pieces remain missing. This is based on an in-person activity that I do at public archaeology events to help visitors understand laboratory methods and induction. I used the app Stop Motion Studio for taking the frame photos and strung them together in the Windows 10 Photos app. I drew the animated overlays frame-by-frame in Inkscape.”

Jury Prizes

• To Maggie and Abby Mullen, in the ‘Story of a Site’ category
• To Karen Miller, in the ‘Biography of an Object’ category
• To Beth Pruitt, in the ‘Archaeological Theory’ category

Best Overall and Choix du Peuple

To be announced May 4th! Make your votes on the Choix du Peuple:

Tuesday May 5th:

And with the polls closed, looks like ‘Tea-Construction’ is the Choix du Peuple!