ROBINSON CRUSOE: FROM THE STORY TO STOP-MOTION
ROBINSON CRUSOE: FROM THE STORY TO STOP-MOTION
We interviewed five students (4BL), Marika Bedont, Michela Canavesi, Clea Gjoni, Andrea Lenna, Julia Zanzarelli, who worked on Robinson Crusoe (1719), a novel by Daniel Defoe and then, as a group work, recreated the plot in an original and creative way. Robinson Crusoe was a man who wanted to travel around the world. One of his friends invited him to travel with him but during their journey they were attacked by pirates and he was taken as a prisoner and lived as a slave. They managed to escape and arrived at an island of indigenous people. They lived there for a while but then they went back to sea and they found a Portuguese ship, which took Crusoe to Brazil where he started a plantation and lived for several years. Then he left again as he embarked on a slave gathering expedition to Africa but ended up shipwrecked off of the coast of Trinidad. After living there for many years while trying to survive, an English ship arrived and Crusoe was taken back to England to his family. The students first read the book in class with their teacher, Dr. Vincenza Leone, and summarized the chapters identifying the most important events.
After that they worked on the summaries by brainstorming together about the different parts and Michela Canavesi made little sketches about the most iconic scenes creating a storyboard. They developed those ideas using the stop-motion technique: it consists of taking pictures of static objects in a frame, in their case plasticine models, moving them around in small increments while photographing each individual frame at a time, and then putting them together creating a video. After the shooting, they recorded the narrating voice and synchronized it with the video. The group worked on it for almost three months and the classmates and the teacher really appreciated the product (play video).
“We decided to use these plasticine models and stop-motion because it is a very particular way to represent something, it lets you create whatever you want, and it is a visual representation that can describe not only the events but also the emotions and the feelings of the characters,” said the group.
Matera Leo, Spata Lorenzo (3BL)