When I was 13 my parents got a camcorder. I remember one night at the dinner table I decided to do an experiment. I set up the camera on a tripod aimed at my bowl of soup and every time I took a bite, I would go over to the camera and hit record-stop as fast as I could. Pretty quickly I saw that I could make a stop-motion with the bowl of soup and eventually I was moving around plates, napkins, and placemats to make a little dancing ensemble of dinnerware.
I consider this my "turning point" in life because I realized that I could make my own claymations. I had always been fascinated by cartoons and animation but I had always thought it required expensive tools to do. But here I was, clicking the buttons on a run-of-the-mill camcorder and making my own animated movies!
That summer I created a whole collection of claymations, sometimes making wrestlers with my little brother, other times making a simple run cycle for a character. One time I even made my own movie parody: "Indiana Caudill and the Soccer Ball of Doom!" where in a climactic scene my brother gets chased by a riding lawn mower! This point in my life turned me from a simple fan of cartoons into an imaginative creator!
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