Videomaking with AmericanGirl088

As many of you know, I got to see Alex (americangirl088) this week! We had so many ideas about what to film, but we decided to do a stopmotion remake of the hunger games movie. That was a very ambitious idea, but we had 6 hours. We scrambled around in the woods for awhile, looking for the perfect places to film the scenes. Alex and I discovered a fantastic tree for Katniss to sleep in, a great place for the cornucopia, a creek where Katniss could find Peeta, and even a field for the finale- and the eating of the poison berries. Once we got the dolls all dressed up and ready in matching outfits according to their districts, we lugged them out into the forest in a laundry bin. We set them up in a circle for the first scene around the cornucopia. After attempting to take a few pictures before they fell over, we gave up. It seemed smart to narrow down our huge idea- filming the whole movie would take at least 3 days. (especially with the dolls falling over every 2 seconds!)

Alex and I then considered the options for scenes that would be worth filming. There are already many american girl doll stopmotions of Rue's death on youtube, so we figured we should do something more original. We found a fantastic cave when we were clambering down the hillside near the creek. It was perfect for the Peeta and Katniss cave scene! Figuring that it was a more original idea than Rue's death scene, we climbed back up to get the dolls. Alex and I realized we could fit in a clever transition between the two scenes, so we decided that would should just film both. We had 3 hours.

We started with the Rue scene. After looking around for quite a while to find the perfect spot, we settled on a little mossy ledge on the cliff that leads to the river. I laid down Nali, (who was playing Rue) and stuffed the end of an arrow shaped stick into her jacket so that it looked like she had been stabbed. But then came our next dilemma. What were we going to use for blood? There were not any red berries nearby, and it wasn't like Alex and I were going use our own blood. Alex suddenly noticed a dark red powder on the tip of her shoe. I scraped off as much as I could, and smeared it on Nali's jacket around the spear. (We were kind of curious as to what made the red powder, and soon we realized that it was from the inside of a rotting log.) After we had everything set up and were ready to film, we only had about 2 hours left. Alex and I decided that instead of doing 2 crummy scenes, we might as well just concentrate on this one, and make it perfect. That was a smart choice.

When we finished filming, we had only 30 minutes until Alex had to go home. The scene had worked really well, and we were both tired, freezing, and absolutely ravenous. My stomach felt so empty, I swear I would have eaten tree bark. We gathered up the dolls and hiked back to the house, both wishing that we had more time to film- a lot more time. Next time Alex comes, she has to spend at least 2 days. Maybe then we can make the whole movie. ;)

Stay tuned to both of our channels for the stopmotion we created and a behind the scenes video:

youtube.com/user/Americangirl088

youtube.com/user/basilmentos