The Hudy Maker Camp 2015: Week of Fantasy, and the making of Makey the Time Traveler!

Maker Camp started this past week. For those of you who do not know already Maker Camp is a 6 week online virtual camp. My brothers and I were introduced to Maker Camp last summer and really had a great time with all the projects. Each week is different theme and each day has different projects in the theme. Its purpose to encourage making and creating. This year we have 10 people participating in what we call the Hudy Maker Camp. The theme for this week was fantasy.

We started the week with two projects first making a sketch book:

Keane and Nathan working on their sketch books.

Bentley showing us her sketch book creation.

One of the other projects for the week was to make a mask out of cardboard. We all had a lot fun doing that with everyone putting their spin on it.

Nathan, Daytona and Keane all working on their mask creations, even our dog Boomer was getting in on the fun!

Nathan and Bentley showing their Mask creations!

Carson decided he wanted to make a Mosasaurus out of cardboard.

As the week progressed we started working on the movie making project.We had two ideas for movies, the first theme was a desert southwest feature which involves a CGI scorpion, this is a work in progress. The second, a Stop Motion film called Makey the Time Traveler. The story is Makey the robot from Make and an Indian Jones character use a time machine to travel back in time to teach kids about making. While on their journey back in time they meet some very important kids Leonardo De Vinci, Michelangelo, and the future Queen Victoria; they teach them about making as kids, perhaps changing the course of history. However, at some point things do not go as planned!

We started learning about stop motion animation over a year ago and have learned all about lighting, sound and motion, so when this project came up we were all excited to get started. We met our friend Daytona sometime ago through homeschooling, he shares our excitement with stop motion animation and has done some really cool stuff on his site www.yolomonkeystudios.com. When we all get together the ideas begin to flow and its a lot of fun to create and try out all the new things we are learning to do!

Story concept creators Reagan, Carson, Keane and Daytona

Director Daytona and Set Designer Keane getting the first shot ready for filming.

The day was spent making the movie and it was a team effort. Creating the sets and getting the storyline to match required us to be as creative as possible. It was so much fun to break out all of our Lego’s and figure out what we needed to make! The time machine was a working Lego safe that Reagan had built not long ago. Daytona has been building specialized Lego characters so we used some of those as well.

We had creature creator and co-founder of Mx3Designs Carson making all the clay figures for the Jurassic shots.

Elise, Keane and Carson were in charge of prop creation.

Adding sound and effects is one of the things we enjoy it helps brings the characters and story to life, as well as keeps us laughing with all the funny sounds available.