At first, I started doing this video for extra credit in my studio art class during my sophomore year. Since my art teacher knew that I was interested in film, she suggested that I enter into a video contest put on by the Russian River Watershed Association. The contest demanded that the participants make a video that would educate the viewers about water conservation. The theme for that year was outdoor residential water conservation. The video was supposed to be from thirty to sixty seconds in duration. Although this video was relatively short, I soon learned that making videos, even short ones, takes a lot of time, patience, creativity and organization. When making informative videos, you always want to stay true to your overall message so I knew that the first thing that I had to do was to figure out exactly what I wanted my message to be. Then from there I would come up with creative ways to convey that message in my video. After trying and failing with several ideas, I came up with the idea of stop animation. Stop animation is when you take a picture of an object, manipulate the object, take another picture, manipulate it some more, and so on. Each picture is one frame which you can play in order to make a video. Stop animation is always something cool to have in a video because it gives it a playful tone and a homemade feel to it. I had done some stop animation with clay before but never for a video of this length. In the past, I had only made segments a few seconds long. However, the process takes an extremely long time to do. My video was only about forty seconds long but it took me about eight hours in total just to create all the frames.