Devon's Joke 2018






Last year, during March Break, Devon and I had a lot of fun making a stop motion animation film using lots of his Lego characters!  Have you seen Devon’s Joke 2017???

This year, we were inspired to make another stop motion animation film!  One that was even better than last year’s film!!

The idea began to form some time in February.  Devon and I took a pocketful of his allowance money to a toy store, to look for a new toy to buy.  We found a really fun building set that would let him build all sorts of dinosaurs!  It has plastic pieces, metal pieces and lots of metal brackets that had to be bolted together using an assortment of small bolts and two kinds of nuts.  It took us a few days to build the first dinosaur – a T-rex!  Once it was built, a spark of imagination took hold in my mind!!

Devon and I began talking about how it would be really funny to make a part of our movie look like he was building the dinosaur.  The dinosaur was to be the main character in our film.  He was going to be the joke teller.  I told Devon that it would be very difficult to do a good job making it look like he was building the dinosaur, if we started with a pile of building pieces.  I told him that it would look really cool if we filmed the dinosaur being taken apart and then played those bits of film backwards!!!  We discussed this concept a few times during the weeks leading to March Break – I wanted him to fully understand what it was that we would be doing!

That was about the only preparation we had when we began the project!

March Break started and the very next day, we began to work on the film.  But what would we do at the beginning?  What would the joke be?  Who would hear the dinosaur’s joke?  How would we end the film?  We had no idea!

Just like last year’s joke, Devon and I just made it up as we went along.  That was what made this project so much fun – how it was completely spontaneous!

Since Devon is learning how to play the piano, we decided to film him playing a short song as our introduction.  It was during the filming of this part when we thought that it would be funny to show his collection of paper robots climbing over top of his piano while he was playing it, so they could gather together on the table – ready to hear the joke!  We had to use our imagination and a bit of ingenuity to make it look like the paper robots were jumping off of the piano, onto the tabletop!

Then – before the joke was told – we had to figure out what joke we wanted to tell.  We spent the next half hour reading jokes from Devon’s Chickadee magazine and we finally settled on a joke that ended up talking about Moose-tery movies!  Once we made this decision and idea sparked in my mind about how we would end our film.  Since Devon has grown to love Scooby-Doo, I thought that it would be funny to use this idea to end our film.

We filmed most of the movie in just one afternoon!  We decided to take a break and film the ‘backwards’ part of the film – Devon building the T-rex – the next day!

It took me almost three afternoons to put the film together.  All the editing!  Adding sound effects to all the voices to make the characters sound like robots!  Adding additional music to the movie to make it more fun!  And finding a small clip of audio from a Scooby-Doo DVD to end the film!  A lot of work!!

So – with no further adieu…. I present to you….


Please enjoy!!!!




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